[Mono-list] Mono on XScale

[Paolo Molaro]

On 07/25/05 Uhlmann, Albrecht wrote:
> we are required to estimate the effort necessary to run Mono runtime
> engine on an XScale (ARM core) based board. Can anyone give some hints,
> i.e. how many lines of code exist in the runtime engine, is it plain C
> or C++ or ???, are there many CPU-specific optimizations (like inline
> assembly etc), on what APIs is it based (POSIX, standard UNIX) etc? Did
> anyone come across such a request before, and would it make sense at all
> from your point of view to run Mono on such a small embedded processor?

Mono uses a JIT at its core, so the amount of code to port is
about 5000 lines (most of them C, with some assembly).
We are currently porting the jit to ARM processors: the initial target
is armv5 running linux in little endian mode, because that is
the hw we have for testing.
Once done, a port to other systems or big endian mode is trivial as long
as the system supports pthreads. I try to keep the code compatible with
armv4, but people will either need to send me the hardware to test or
they'd have to actually test the support themselves.
We'll initially support only FPA floating point code and, maybe, user-mode
fp emulation using libfloat.
If you're interested in the port, you could start reading the mini porting
docs on the web site or better in the mono svn module. We should also
have something running on Linux/ARM in a few weeks.

lupus

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