[Mono-list] Power Pc support ppc64

[Andreas Färber]

Hello,

Am 21.10.2008 um 15:49 schrieb Scott Fluto:

> I was wondering what the status is of mono running on the power
> architecture , specifically the ppc64 given we would like run it on  
> the
> IBM power pc architecture. I found the thread on bugzilla #324134 that
> was started last july and I see there are still posts to it as of the
> past week so im not sure if its fully complete. If not, if its been a
> year , how long would it take to get it fully running on power pc. We
> would consider contributing to the effort but we are wondering how  
> much
> has to be thrown at the problem given the time put into it so far.

I started the ppc64 port for an Artificial Intelligence competition,  
to accomodate rapidly growing decision trees. The porting took too  
long, so our team simply had to cut the tree small and run on 32-bit  
ppc and move some larger tests to Solaris/amd64.

I did continue the port as time permitted, but it soon reached a state  
requiring strong debugging skills. I occasionally found some smaller  
but unrelated errors, spent a lot of time simply keeping up with code  
moving around in HEAD, but didn't find the cause of an early crash. It  
was trying to execute something that didn't look like generated code  
at all, throwing a SIGILL iirc. Possibly a problem with function  
descriptors of some kind.

Following the Linear IR introduction in trunk, a lot of new code still  
needs to be added to handle, e.g., new 64-bit-long opcodes.  
Contributions and testing (esp. on Linux) would help there, to reach  
the previous debugging stage again.

A time frame is hard to guess under these circumstances. There is  
growing interest from Linux distros, but that alone doesn't fix the  
issues.

Andreas