[Mono-dev] MIPS port update

[Mark E Mason]

Hello all,
 
The initial changes for the MIPS port for Mono have now been committed.
At this point I'd call the port partially working:

- only o32/big-endian is supported at the moment
- most of the basic*.exe tests in mono/mini pass.
- conditional exceptions aren't thrown in many cases
- exception filters don't work correctly yet (which means catching is
broken)
- there's a bug in passing 64-bit aligned structures by value that I
just found a good test case for (it's been committed to basic-calls.cs)
- atomic operations are not implemented yet (I'm working on this now).
- I'm certain there's some outright code generation bugs.

Development so far has been on a Linux system (Debian/etch) running in
big-endian mode with an o32 userland.  I've made some use of the mips32
instruction set - particularly in the area of generating floating point
conversion operations.

I'm continuing to plug away at this.  If anyone has any questions or is
interested in either using or contributing to this port, please let me
know.

Thanks again to the Mono team, and in particular Paolo and Massi for the
help in getting this up and running.

Cheers,
Mark