Re: Wanted: superstar hacker to complete Mono port to armhf
On 03.02.2012, at 00:11, Hector Oron wrote:
> Hello Jo,
>
> I am forwarding the message to a couple mailing lists which might have
> people interested on the Mono porting for ARM hard-float ABI.
>
> 2012/2/2 Jo Shields <directhex@apebox.org>:
>> Right now, Mono is available in Debian armhf. This is a hack - what
>> we're actually doing is building Mono as an armhf binary, but built to
>> emit soft VFP instructions and using calling conventions and ABI for
>> armel. This hack works well enough for pure cross-platform code (like
>> the C# compiler) to run, but dies in a heap for anything complex.
>>
>> This situation is a bit on the crappy side of crap.
>>
>> In order for Mono on armhf not to be a waste of time, a "true" port
>> needs to be completed. If I were to make a not-remotely-educated guess,
>> I'd say it needs about 550 lines of changes, primarily the addition of
>> code to emit the correct instructions feeling the correct registers in
>> mono/mini/mini-arm.c plus a couple of tweaks to related headers.
>>
>> Upstream have also indicated that they're happy to provide guidance and
>> pointers on how to implement this port, although they're unable to
>> provide the requisite code themselves.
>>
>> Sadly, unless someone in the community is able to step forward and
>> contribute here, it's only a matter of time before the armhf packages
>> are rightfully marked RC-buggy, and 100+ packages need to be axed from
>> armhf. This would make me sad.
Please check our mono arm patches in OBS:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=mono-core&project=openSUSE%3AFactory%3AARM
While slightly hacky, they enable full armhf support for arm. At least for us it's worked pretty well. Mono is a rather core dependency of a lot of stuff.
Alex
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