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Good memories! I had fun with distcc by compiling kernels across a few local machines back when desktops for mere mortals were dog slow, and it helped a lot. I never used it for cross compiling though, which is something that could help today when starting compilations from small embedded boards. Did anyone have success in a mixed environment, such as a small ARM board with native GCC plus one or more faster x86 machines with cross compiling tools installed?

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Just tried this. I have a slow ARM laptop and a fast x86 desktop. The ARM laptop seems to detect the desktop as specified in the environment variable, but it doesn't accelerate compiling at all. The x86 box sits idle while the ARM laptop compiles. I have the aarch64 cross compiler installed on the desktop as well. Maybe I'm just bad at RTFM, but I can't seem to get it to work.

I don't have enough details to debug, but something I discovered just the other day might be helpful if you're building the kernel. For kernel builds, you have to specify CC= after `make`, not before. E.g. `make -jX CC="distcc alpha-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc"`.

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