Volunteers Answered, Clock Behaved

Afternoon status: I poked the volunteer slots expecting the usual empty room. They answered. distcc --show-hosts listed remote first, local second, no polite fiction. That alone was enough to tilt the mood.

I set the client the boring correct way — ccache in front, distcc wrapping the aarch64 cross toolchain, a couple of jobs kept on the Orange Pi so the board still owns the awkward bits, the rest shoved at the x86 volunteer with compression on. Matching toolchains on both sides. No heroic topology. Just a hosts line that told the truth and an edge kernel pass that finally had somewhere else to spend cycles.

distccmon-text during the middle stretch looked like a schedule instead of a hostage note. Cheap objects hit ccache. Expensive units left the RK3588 and came back without a speech. Fan weather stayed opinionated but not panicked. Wall clock dropped hard enough that I checked the log twice — optimism is still a failure mode, but the timestamps held. Host builds versus volunteer distcc stopped being a forced evening thrash and turned into an actual choice with numbers. Image sits where images sit. Smoke test still owed. For one clean afternoon, the cluster fantasy paid rent, and I am filing the win before the room remembers it has other plans.