[Mono-devel-list] Hardware Requirements (Porting)

Mike Stanley mstanley at cauldronsolutions.com
Thu Feb 5 12:51:24 EST 2004


Thanks!  

Miguel/Paolo... You've been very helpful and have given me enough to make
the argument to those who have ultimate control over my available time for
such an effort.  I will keep the list posted on any status.  In the
meantime, I've started to begin reading :-)  *cough* luckily *cough* I have
a 2 hour a day train commute so there is some time for reading.

You'll definitely here from me again (its just a question of how soon and
how much)...

Keep up the good work guys.  The (continued) success of Mono will have a
tremendous impact.  (and it has been one of my favorite projects to watch
since its inception)

- Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paolo Molaro [mailto:lupus at ximian.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 11:59 AM
> To: Mike Stanley
> Cc: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
> Subject: Re: [Mono-devel-list] Hardware Requirements (Porting)
> 
> On 02/02/04 Mike Stanley wrote:
> > I'm new to the list, fairly new to mono, and definitely a 
> newbie when 
> > it comes to porting.  I'm an expert J2EE developer, 
> intermediate .NET 
> > developer, and rusty C developer.  Lately, I've been 
> working primarily 
> > in the embedded C arena, and would love to be able to port 
> mono to a target
> > platform.   I'm not necessarily interested in a JIT runtime 
> compiler, but
> > rather just interested in having the ability to compile c# 
> to a native
> > application.   
> 
> C# need the runtime to run, so you basically always need the 
> jit anyway.
> 
> > Before I head down this path, I just wanted to know whether 
> or not it 
> > would be possible.  What is the minimum system requirements for 
> > porting mono?  I'm looking for a recommendation (yeah or nah) given 
> > the following specs (and given your experiences):
> >  
> > - 166 MHz (MIPS) 32 bit RISC Processor
> > - 16 Mb DRAM
> > - 4 Mb Graphic Dram
> > - 4 Mb Flash EPROM
> 
> The current minimum sizes for the runtime is roughly 1 MB for 
> the runtime and 1 MB for corlib. Of course both contain a lot 
> of code that may not be needed for the applications that will 
> run on the device and runtime memory usage could be shrinked 
> a lot, too: we just haven't spent the cycles to optimize for 
> size, yet.
> In the end, it depends on what kind of applications you need 
> to run: you can run them on mono/x86 and measure memory 
> usage: it would be a fairly close estimate of how much it 
> would take on mips. You could also use the profiling tools to 
> see how memory use and speed could be improved to see if it 
> would be ok on the embedded platform.
> 
> > If possible can someone give me an idea about the level of 
> difficulty 
> > and time estimate (minus the reading - which I know is 
> substantial.  
> > btw. I have a comp. eng. background, with hardware, 
> assembly lang, os 
> > dev, experience)
> 
> Since mips is very close to ppc, you can probably do a basic 
> port in a couple of weeks. Supporting exceptions and some of 
> the other advanced features will take a month or two (of 
> course you need to double or triple the estimates for 
> unscheduled late night debugging sessions...).
> I have already written the low-level code to emit mips native 
> code, so a chunk of the work is already done:-) Your 
> background is very good for this sort of porting work, too.
> Please also take a look at the porting document as suggested 
> by Miguel and feel free to ask me (or on the list) any jit 
> and runtime porting question you may have.
> 
> > P.S.  Out of curiosity has anyone attempted to port mono to 
> the new TI 
> > and/or ARM based Palm OS devices?
> 
> Malte/Serge started a port of the JIT to ARM, but I don't 
> know what is the status and it hasn't been submitted for 
> inclusion in cvs. The port was for Linux: handling the PalmOS 
> weirdnesses would undoubtly increase the complexity of the port.
> 
> lupus
> 
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> lupus at debian.org                                     debian/rules
> lupus at ximian.com                             Monkeys do it better
> 




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