[mythtv-users] Best options/howto for diskless frontends

[Raymond Wagner]

On 2/26/2013 11:43, Paul Gardiner wrote:
> Now it's all working, I'm wondering how to use chroot. Since
> I have the whole of / as a writable nfs share, I guess I can
> do most things (like installing other packages in yast) by
> just sshing in to the running frontend, but for building
> mythtv I'd rather use the
> fast processor on the backend than the ION frontend. I imagine
> I can use chroot to do that, but I don't know what I'm
> supposed to do to set up /dev /sys /proc, or if I need to.
> Do I mount devtmpfs in the chroot's /dev? Not sure if I need
> proc or sys just for a build.

Consult the Gentoo manual install docs.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml#doc_chap2_sect8

It should work fairly universally, regardless of what distro you are using.

The only concern I would have in doing what you describe is whether your 
build machine is actually a close enough match to your ION frontend. I 
have a single root disk image that gets periodically updated, cloned, 
and pushed out to several diskless frontends, including an i3, an AM2 
Athlon, and a 939 Athlon. If I update that image on the i3 using the 
standard '--enable-proc-opts', MythTV will get compiled with certain SSE 
extensions that the older Athlons do not support, and they will crash if 
I attempt playback. Cross-compiling is considerably more involved than 
simply chrooting into the other environment.