[Gentoo Prefix][1] allows you to place a “prefixed environment” wherever you would like. So, if you want to be able to access your prefix on a NFS network it would make sense to put the prefix in /home for example. I don’t have any solid numbers but I can imagine that the IO for the nfs server is pretty high when emerging. I would rather not suffer the penalties of compile on NFS but also I WOULD like to access PORTAGE_TMPDIR from any host.

Yesterday, zmedico wrote about building multiple packages in parallel with Portage-2.2_rc2. In Gentoo Prefix, we had a sneak peak to this feature, so I have had some time to play with it on my dual-quad core box. Some timing results that you may like: emerge -e system (excluding sys-devel/gcc) As a baseline: With --jobs=1 and MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 77m54.290s<br /> user 41m46.086s<br /> sys 29m14.598s Because I was skeptical of what --jobs could really do, I decided to start with small number of parallel jobs: With --jobs=3, MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 61m30.181s<br /> user 42m23.398s<br /> sys 32m32.009s While that was running, I noticed a very significant amount of time where my cores were idle, thanks to the handy little xfce-extra/xfce4-cpugraph widget.