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=openS...
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