distcc User Manual Martin Pool $Date: 2003/04/05 00:46:27 $, for distcc 2.1cvs Introduction

"Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure." --- Aldous Huxley

Overview

is a program to distribute compilation of C or C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local compile, is simple to install and use, and is often significantly faster than a local compile.

Unlike other distributed build systems, distcc does not require all machines to share a filesystem, have synchronized clocks, or to have the same libraries or header files installed.

Compilation is centrally controlled by a client machine, which is typically the developer's workstation or laptop. The distcc client runs on this machine, as does make, the preprocessor, the linker, and other stages of the build process. Any number of "volunteer" machines help the client to build the program, by running the compiler and assembler as required. The volunteer machines run the distccd daemon which listens on a network socket for requests.

distcc sends the complete preprocessed source code across the network for each job, so all it requires of the volunteer machines is that they be running the distccd daemon, and that they have an appropriate compiler installed.

distcc is designed to be used with GNU make's parallel-build feature (-j). Shipping files across the network takes time, but few cycles on the client machine. Any files that can be built remotely are essentially "for free" in terms of client CPU.

distcc was written by Martin Pool.

distcc was inspired by Andrew Tridgell's program.

If you find distcc useful, please try to complete the survey form in the distribution, or just send an email.

Licence

distcc and the distcc User Manual are copyright (C) 2002, 2003 by Martin Pool.

distcc is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the distcc User Manual under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

distcc is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License and GNU Free Documentation License along with distcc. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA, or see .

The author understands the GNU GPL to apply to distcc in the following way: you are allowed to use distcc to compile a non-free program, or to call it from a non-free Make, or to call a non-free compiler. However, you may not distribute a modified version of distcc unless you comply with the terms of the GPL: in particular, giving your users access to the source code and the right to redistribute it, and clearly identifying your changes.

Security Considerations

distcc should only be used on networks where all machines and all users are trusted.

The distcc daemon, distccd, allows other machines on the network to run arbitrary commands on the volunteer machine. Anyone that can make a connection to the volunteer machine can run essentially any command as the user running distccd.

distcc is suitable for use on a small to medium network of friendly developers. It's certainly not suitable for use on a machine connected to the Internet or a large (e.g. university campus) network without firewalling in place.

inetd or tcpwrappers can be used to impose access control rules, but this should be done with an eye to the possibility of address spoofing.

In summary, the security level is similar to that of old-style network protocols like X11-over-TCP, NFS or RSH.

Getting Started

Four straightforward steps are required to install and use distcc: Compile and install the distcc package on the client and volunteer machines. Start the distccd daemon on all volunteer machines. On the client, set the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable to indicate which volunteer machines to use. For example: DISTCC_HOSTS='angry toey:4202 localhost' Set the CC variable or edit Makefiles to prefix distcc to calls to the C/C++ compiler. For example: distcc gcc -o hello.o -c hello.c

Reporting Bugs

If you think you have found a bug, please check the manual and the TODO file to see if it is a known restriction. If not, please send a clear and detailed report to the mailing list distcc@lists.samba.org. (For a clear and detailed description of "clear and detailed", see Simon Tatham's advice on reporting bugs, .)

A good bug report for distcc should include: What you're trying to do. For example: "compile KDE", "use gcc's -MD option". What actually happens. For example: "distcc fails with error 104", "the compilation never completes", "I get error message XXX". The version of distcc you're using (the output of --version on both client and server. If you got it from a distribution rather than building it yourself, then mention that. What other software you're using, in particular the operating system and compiler. For the operating system it's normally enough to give the overall version (FreeBSD CURRENT, RedHat Linux 7.2, ...). For the compiler, use "gcc -version". The exact command you're using to run the compilation. If you're using make, then include the line from its output that runs the compiler. The debug logs from the client and server. On the client, you should set DISTCC_VERBOSE and DISTCC_LOG. On the server, use --verbose and --log-file. If you can, trim the log files to just the invocation that causes trouble. Grepping for a process id can help with this. If the problem is intermittent, then please leave logging running until it recurs and then pull out a smaller section of logs to send.

Please do not obfuscate your logs. The name of a single source file or machine is probably not confidential information, but the confusion introduced by editing logs can be significant.

Please send a problem description to the distcc mailing list, on lists.samba.org. Please don't send mail direct to the author: if you use the list, other people may be able to help you, and the answers are publicly archived.

Test Suite

distcc has a test suite written in Python using the ComfyChair framework. It does not yet exercise all functionality, but is improving.

To run the test suite, run make check from the distcc source directoy.

Using distcc Invoking distcc

To setup distcc to be compatible with the widest range of existing software, create a "masquerade dir" of compiler links that will invoke distcc. When the distcc-in-disguise gets invoked, it invokes the real compiler of the same name either on the local client machine, or on a remote volunteer host.

For instance, you could create the directory named /usr/lib/distcc/bin and populate it links (symlinks are slightly easier to maintain in the long run, but use hard links if you prefer them): $ mkdir /usr/lib/distcc/bin $ cd /usr/lib/distcc/bin $ ln -s ../../../bin/distcc gcc $ ln -s ../../../bin/distcc cc $ ln -s ../../../bin/distcc g++ $ ln -s ../../../bin/distcc c++

Then, to use distcc, a user just needs to put the directory /usr/lib/distcc/bin early in the PATH (and have set the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable) and distcc will handle the rest. Note that this masquerade dir must occur on the PATH earlier than the directory that contains the actual compilers of the same names, and that any auxiliary programs that these compilers call (such as "as" or "ld") must also be found on the PATH in a dir after the masquerade dir (since distcc calls out to the real compiler with a PATH value that has all dirs up to and including the masquerade dir trimmed off).

An alternate setup is to prefix the distcc command to compiler command lines so that it is called explicitly. This allows you to more easily control which things use distcc and which things don't, but can be more problematical when trying to use distcc with existing projects.

For example, to compile the standard application program: distcc gcc -o hello.o -c hello.c

Standard Makefiles, including those using the GNU autoconf/automake system use the $CC variable as the name of the C compiler to run and the $CXX variable as the name of the C++ compiler to run. In many cases, it is sufficient to just override one or both of these variables, either from the command line, or perhaps from your login script (if you wish to use distcc for all compilations). The following example sets both variables and takes advantage of the fact that distcc defaults to calling "gcc" if no other compiler name is provided: make CC=distcc CXX='distcc g++'

Unfortunately, this setup sometimes leads to incompatibilities with packages that don't expect the compiler name to contain spaces or to projects that don't honor the above variables when deciding what compiler to use. For instance, the KDE package will fail to compile using the above CXX-munging idiom, but will compile just fine if you use a masquerade dir (which causes all executions of "g++" to really run distcc).

Options

Options to distcc must precede the compiler name. Any arguments or options following the name of the compiler are passed through to the compiler.

--help

Print a detailed usage message and exit.

--version

Show distcc version and exit.

Environment Variables

The way in which distcc runs the compiler is controlled by a few environment variables.

NOTE: Some versions of make do not export Make variables as environment variables by default. Also, assignments to variables within the Makefile may override their definitions in the environment that calls make. The most reliable method seems to be to set DISTCC_* variables in the environment of Make, and to set CC on the right-hand-side of the Make command line. For example: $ DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost wistful toey' $ PATH="/usr/lib/distcc/bin:$PATH" $ export DISTCC_HOSTS PATH $ ./configure $ make all

or: $ DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost wistful toey' $ export DISTCC_HOSTS $ CC='distcc' ./configure $ make CC='distcc' all

Some Makefiles may, contrary to convention, explicitly call gcc or some other compiler, in which case overriding $CC will not be enough to call distcc. While this is harmless (but suboptimal), using a masquerade dir of distcc links will avoid this.

Remember that you should not use both methods for calling distcc at the same time. If you are using a masquerade dir, don't munge CC and/or CXX (just put the dir early on your PATH). If you're not using a masquerade dir, you'll need to either change CC and/or CXX, or modify the Makefile(s) to call distcc explicitly.

DISTCC_HOSTS

Space-separated list of volunteer host specifications.

DISTCC_VERBOSE

If set to 1, distcc produces explanatory messages on the standard error stream. This can be helpful in debugging problems. Bug reports should include verbose output.

DISTCC_LOG

Log file to receive messages from distcc itself, rather than stderr.

DISTCC_SAVE_TEMPS

If set to 1, temporary files are not deleted after use. Good for debugging, or if your disks are too empty.

DISTCC_TCP_CORK

If set to 0, disable use of "TCP corks", even if they're present on this system. Using corks normally helps pack requests into fewer packets and aids performance.

Which Jobs are Distributed?

Building a C or C++ program on Unix involves several phases: Preprocessing source ( Compiling preprocessed source ( Assembling to an object file ( Linking object files and libraries to form an executable, library, or shared library.

distcc only ever runs the compiler and assembler remotely. The preprocessor must always run locally because it needs to access various header files on the local machine which may not be present, or may not be the same, on the volunteer. The linker similarly needs to examine libraries and object files, and so must run locally.

The compiler and assembler take only a single input file, the preprocessed source, produce a single output, the object file. distcc ships these two files across the network and can therefore run the compiler/assembler remotely.

Fortunately, for most programs running the preprocessor is relatively cheap, and the linker is called relatively infrequent, so most of the work can be distributed.

distcc examines its command line to determine which of these phases are being invoked, and whether the job can be distributed. Here is an example of a typical command that can be preprocessed locally and compiled remotely: distcc gcc -o hello.o -DGREETING="hello" -c hello.c

The command-line scanner is intended to behave in the same way as gcc. In case of doubt, distcc runs the job locally.

In particular, this means that commands that compile and link in one go cannot be distributed. These are quite rare in realistic projects. Here is one example of a command that could not be distributed, because it calls the compiler and linker distcc gcc -o hello hello.c

Running Jobs in Parallel

Moving source across the network is less efficient to compiling it locally. If you have access to a machine much faster than your workstation, the performance gain may overwhelm the cost of transferring the source code and it may be quicker to ship all your source across the network to compile it there.

In general, it is even better to compile on two or machines in parallel. Any number of invocations of distcc can run at the same time, and they will distribute their work across the available hosts.

distcc does not manage parallelization, but relies on Make or some other build system to invoke compiles in parallel.

With GNU Make, you should use the $ export DISTCC_HOSTS='angry toey wistful localhost' $ make -j5

Choosing a Host

The $DISTCC_HOSTS variable tells distcc which volunteer machines are available to run jobs. This is a space-separated list of host specifications, each of which has the syntax: HOSTNAME[/MAX_JOBS][:PORT]

You can specify the maximum number of jobs that the host should receive by affixing a number after a slash (e.g. "localhost/2").

A numeric TCP port may optionally be specified after a colon. If no port is specified, it uses the default, which is currently 3632.

If only one invocation of distcc runs at a time, it will always execute on the first host in the list. (This behaviour is not absolutely guaranteed, however, and may change in future versions.)

The name localhost is handled specially by running the compiler in place.

The daemon may be tested on localhost by setting DISTCC_HOSTS=127.0.0.1 Although localhost causes distcc to execute the job directly, using an IP address will cause it to make a TCP connection to a daemon on localhost. This is slower, but useful for testing. Load Distribution Algorithm

When distcc is invoked, it needs to decide which of the volunteers in DISTCC_HOSTS should be used to compile a job. It uses a simple heuristic to try to spread load across machines appropriately.

You can imagine all of the compile machines as being leaky buckets, some with larger holes (faster CPUs) than others. The distcc client tries to keep water at the same level on each one (the same number of jobs running), preferring hosts occurring earlier in DISTCC_HOSTS. Over the course of a build, the faster machines will complete jobs more quickly, and therefore be topped up more quickly and do more work overall, but without the client ever actually needing to know which one is fastest.

This design has the advantage of not requiring the client to know in advance the speeds of the volunteers, and being quite simple to implement. It copes quite well with machines that are temporarily slowed down: they are just topped-up more slowly in the future.

Scheduling is coordinated between different invocations of the distcc client by lockfiles in the temporary directory. There is no coordination between clients running as different users, on different hosts, or with different TMPDIR paths.

On Linux, scheduling slightly too many jobs on any machine is quite harmless, as long as the number is not so high that the machine begins thrashing. So it's OK to provide a -j number substantially higher than the number of available processors.

The biggest problem with this design is that it handles multiprocessor machines poorly: they probably ought to have jobs scheduled proportional to the number of processors. At the moment, the best thing is to run with a -j factor equal to the product of the maximum number of CPUs in any machine (MAX_CPUS) and the number of machines. This should make sure that roughly MAX_CPUS tasks run on every machine at all times, and will therefore keep all CPUs loaded, but will cause excessive task-switching on machines with fewer CPUs. Task switching is not very expensive on Linux so it is not a big problem, but it does lose a few percentage points of speed. This should be fixed in a future release.

Diagnostic Messages

Error messages or warnings from local or remote compilers are passed through to diagnostic output on the client. The compiler takes all file names and line numbers from pragmas in the preprocessed output, so error messages will always have the correct pathnames for files on the client.

distcc can supply extensive debugging information when the verbose option is used. This is controlled by the $DISTCC_VERBOSE environment variable on the client, and the --verbose option on the server.

By default, distcc prints diagnostic messages to stderr. Sometimes these are too intrusive into the output of the regular compiler, and so they may be selectively redirected by setting the $DISTCC_LOG environment variable to a filename.

Error messages from the daemon are sent to both the log file on the volunteer, and also back to the client's diagnostic output. (By default, it uses the syslog daemon channel.) If compilation is failing, please examine the log file on the relevant volunteer machine. distcc Exit Codes

The exit code of distcc is normally that of the compiler: zero for successful compilation and non-zero otherwise.

If distcc fails to distribute a job to a selected volunteer machine, it will try to run the compiler locally on the client. distcc only tries a single remote machine for each job.

distcc tries to distinguish between a failure to distribute the job, and a "genuine" failure of the compiler on the remote machine, for example because of a syntax error in the program. In the second case, distcc does not re-run the compiler locally, and returns the same exit code as the remote compiler.

If the compiler exits with a signal, distcc returns an exit code of 128 plus the signal number, following Unix convention.

If distcc fails to run the compiler, it may return one one of the following error codes. These are also used by distccd.

100

Generic or unspecified failure in distcc.

102 EXIT_BIND_FAILED

Failed to bind and listen on network socket. Port may already be in use.

103

Failed to establish network connection or listen on socket. The host may be invalid or unreachable, or there may be no daemon listening.

104 EXIT_COMPILER_CRASHED

The underlying compiler exited because of a signal. This probably indicates a compiler bug, or a problem with the hardware or OS on the server. (Obsolete in 0.13.)

105 EXIT_OUT_OF_MEMORY

Obvious.

106 EXIT_BAD_HOSTSPEC

$DISTCC_HOSTS was undefined, empty, or syntactically invalid. (At the moment, you should never see this code because distcc will fall back to building locally. Let me know if you would prefer a hard error.)

107 EXIT_IO_ERROR

There was a disk or network IO error while distributing the job. For example, the network may be failing, or a disk on either end may be out of space.

108 EXIT_TRUNCATED

The network socket was closed unexpectedly. This probably indicates a network problem or distcc bug.

109 EXIT_PROTOCOL_ERROR

The distcc internal network protocol was not followed by the remote program. This probably indicates a network problem or distcc bug.

110 EXIT_COMPILER_MISSING

The specified compiler was not found in the path of the server.

111 EXIT_RECURSION

distcc ended up invoking itself recursively. This is caught as an error to prevent unbounded recursion or inefficiency. For example, this error may occur if distcc is called by the cc command in the daemon's path.

File Metadata

distcc transfers only the binary contents of source, error, and object files, without any concern for metadata, attributes, character sets or end-of-line conventions.

distcc never transmits file times across the network or modifies them, and so should not care whether the clocks on the client and volunteer machines are synchronized or not. When an object file is received onto the client, its modification time will be the current time on the client machine.

distcc Compatibility distcc with ccache

distcc works well with the tool for caching compilation results. The best way to use the two of them together is to create a masquerade dir for ccache and a masquerade dir for distcc, and update your path to have the ccache-in-disguise links be found first, followed by the distcc-in-disguise links, and finally the real compiler. For instance: PATH="/usr/lib/ccache/bin:/usr/lib/distcc/bin:$PATH" export PATH

Another alternative is to munge CC and/or CXX to mention both commands: CC='ccache distcc' CXX='ccache distcc g++'

distcc with autoconf

distcc works quite well with autoconf.

DISTCC_VERBOSE can give autoconf trouble because autoconf tries to parse error messages from the compiler. If you redirect distcc's diagnostics using DISTCC_LOG then it seems to be fine.

Some autoconf-based systems "freeze" the compiler name used for configure into their Makefiles. To make them use distcc, you should either set the PATH to include the distcc masquerade dir or set $CC prior to running ./configure, and/or override $CC on the right-hand-side of the Make command line.

Some poorly-written shell scripts may assume that $CC is a single word. Using a masquerade dir avoids this problem.

distcc with libtool

Some versions of libtool seem not to cope well when CC is set to more than one word, such as "distcc gcc". Setting CC=distcc, which is supported in 0.10 and later, seems to work well. Using a masquerade dir, which was first supported in 2.0, is even better (since it avoids problems with C++ programs too).

distcc with Gentoo Linux

Gentoo is a "ports"-based free software distribution, in which packages are always built from source on installation. distcc works well with Gentoo to speed installation.

You can install distcc either using the upstream tarball from distcc.samba.org (which may be newer), or using emerge distcc to get the Gentoo port, which may be better integrated. You can also get ccache with emerge ccache.

Using distcc (and ccache) to speed your "emerge" commands is simplicity itself since full support for these packages is already built into portage. The two items you need to customize for your system are the MAKEOPTS value and the DISTCC_HOSTS value. You can either set these in the /etc/make.conf file, or you can export them from your local environment. Then, simply /etc/make.conf to add the "distcc" (and "ccache") features to the "FEATURE" setting (uncommenting the line, if needed), start up any missing remote distccd servers, and portage will take care of munging the PATH that the ebuild uses in an appropriate manner (note that the Gentoo version of distcc comes with a masquerade dir as a part of the standard installation, and has had this since distcc-1.1-r8 (when it was first patched into the ebuild). For example, if you wanted 9 parallel compiles and you had 4 remote systems, you might run something like this: export MAKEOPTS=-j9 export DISTCC_HOSTS='local larry moe curly shemp' emerge packagename

To use distcc for compilations outside of an emerge/ebuild command, include the /usr/lib/distcc/bin dir early on your PATH before configuring/compiling the package.

distcc with gcc dependency computation

gcc has the ability to produce information about header dependencies as a side-effect of preprocessing. These can be included in Makefiles in various ways to make sure that files are up-to-date.

This feature is enabled using -MD, -M and related options.

Unfortunately, gcc changed the behaviour of this feature between gcc 2.95 and 3.x in such a way that it seems properly for distcc to generally support it. The difficulty is that the filename to which dependencies are written depends in a very complicated way on the gcc command line. distcc needs to change the command line to run the preprocessor locally and the compiler remotely, and this can sometimes cause problems. (This also causes problems for Makefiles that are supposed to work with both versions of the compiler.)

-M causes gcc to produce dependency information instead of compiling. distcc understands this and passes the option straight through to gcc. It should work correctly.

With gcc 2.95, -MD always writes dependencies into the preprocessor's working directory. distcc should work fine.

With gcc 3.2, -MD writes the output into either the source directory or output directory, depending on the presence of the -o option. However, gcc 3.2 also has a -MF option that can be used to explicitly set the dependency output file, and this works well with distcc.

In summary: for gcc 2.95, no changes are required. For gcc 3.2, -MF should be used to specify the file to write dependencies to.

The distccd Server

distccd does not need to run as root and should not.

distccd does not have a configuration file; it's behaviour is controlled only by command-line options and requests from clients.

Invoking distccd

These options may be used for either inetd or standalone mode.

If you want to see if the daemon started properly, look in the log file. By default this is something like /var/log/daemon or /var/log/messages, depending on your system.

--help

Explains usage of the daemon and exits.

--version

Shows the daemon version and exits.

-N, --nice NICENESS

Makes the daemon more nice about giving up the CPU to other tasks on the machine. NICENESS is a value from 0 (regular priority) to 20 (lowest priority). This option is good if you want to run distccd in the background on a machine used for other purposes.

-p, --port PORT

Set the TCP port to listen on. (Standalone mode only.)

-P, --pid-file FILE

Save daemon process id to file.

--verbose

Include debug messages in log.

--no-detach

Do not detach from the shell that started the daemon. This may be useful when running distccd from a system such as daemontools that manages daemons after they start.

--no-fork

Don't fork children for each connection, to allow attaching gdb. Don't use this if you don't understand it!

--no-fifo

Send input to the compiler by writing to a temporary file, rather than using a pipe. This is required when the server's temporary directory is on NFS, on at least some machines. It may be faster in some circumstances, but probably is not.

--log-file=FILE

Send messages here instead of syslog.

--log-stderr

Send log messages to stderr, rather than to a file or syslog. This is mainly intended for use in debugging.

--inetd

Serve a client connected to stdin/stdout. As the name suggests, this option should be used when distccd is run from within a super-server like inetd. distccd assumes inetd mode when stdin is a socket.

--daemon

Bind and listen on a socket, rather than running from inetd. This is used for standalone mode. distccd assumes daemon mode at startup if stdin is a tty, so --daemon should be explicitly specified when starting distccd from a script or in a non-interactive ssh connection.

distccd Exit Codes

As for distcc .

distccd Environment Variables

DISTCC_SAVE_TEMPS

If set to 1, temporary files are not deleted after use. Good for debugging or if your disks are too empty.

Cross compiling

Cross compilation means building programs to run on a machine with a different processor, architecture, or operating system to where they were compiled. distcc supports cross compilation, including teams of mixed-architecture machines, although some changes to the compilation commands may be required.

The compilation command passed to distcc must be one that will execute properly on every volunteer machine to produce an object file of the appropriate type. If the machines have different processors, then simply using distcc cc will probably not work, because that will normally invoke the volunteer's native compiler.

Machines with the same instruction set but different operating systems may not necessarily generate compatible .o files. Empirically it seems that the native FreeBSD compiler generates object files compatible with Linux for C programs, but not for C++. It may be a good idea to install a Linux cross compiler on BSD volunteers.

Different versions of the compiler may generate incompatible object files. This seems to be much more of a problem with C++ than with C, because the C++ ABI (application binary interface) has changed in recent years. If you will be building C++ programs, it may be a good idea to install the same version of g++ on all machines.

Several different gcc configurations can be installed side-by-side on any machine. If you build gcc from source, you should use the --program-suffix configuration options to cause it to be installed with a name that encodes the gcc version and the target platform.

The recommended convention for the gcc name is target-gcc-version, such as i686-linux-gcc-3.2. GCC 3.3 will install itself under this name, in addition to target-gcc and, if it's native, gcc-version and gcc.

The compiler must be installed under the same name on the client and on every volunteer machine.

gcc also has -b and -V options to specify a target and version, but at the moment the gcc team recommend using a qualified compiler name instead.

For more information on cross-compiling, see Specifying Target Machine and Compiler Version in the gcc manual, and the gcc installation guide.

distcc Internals Protocol

distcc uses a simple, application-specific protocol running directly over a TCP socket. A new request socket is opened for each job.

The request and response begin with a magic number and version number, allowing incompatible versions or misconfigurations to be identified. At the moment there is only one deployed protocol version, and no attempt to support backward or forward compatibility, though this could be added in the future.

The request and response consist of tagged, length-preceded elements. Each element of the request contains a four-character ASCII token, an eight-digit ASCII hexadecimal length or value, and, depending on the tag, a byte stream whose length is determined by the hexadecimal field.

The complete request is sent to the server before the reply begins. Opening the TCP socket is performed concurrently with execution of the preprocessor on the client.

The request from the client contains Magic number and version Compiler command line Preprocessed source code

The response from the server contains Magic number and version Compiler exit code & status Compiler error messages Compiler stdout Object file (if any)

Consult the source for more information.

Working files

distcc stores working files in a subdirectory of /tmp. These include synchronization files, and compiler input/output temporary files.

Temporary files should normally be cleaned up when the program exits. If distcc misbehaves, these files may be useful in tracking down the cause. Any that remain can be removed by the system's temporary file reaper, or by hand.

Lock files

distcc uses lock files to allow each client to balance its jobs across available volunteer machines. For each volunteer host, a zero-length file is created. Clients using that volunteer hold a flock lock on the file while running.