meebey/debian-mono

This is Mono.

1. Installation
2. Using Mono
3. Directory Roadmap

Compilation and Installation
===============================

a. Build Requirements

On Itanium, you must obtain libunwind:

 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/libunwind/download.php4

On Solaris, make sure that you used GNU tar to unpack this package, as
Solaris tar will not unpack this correctly, and you will get strange errors.

On Solaris, make sure that you use the GNU toolchain to build the software.

Optional dependencies:

 * libgdiplus

   If you want to get support for System.Drawing, you will need to get
   Libgdiplus.    This library in turn requires glib and pkg-config:

 	* pkg-config

     	  Available from: http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/pkgconfig

   	* glib 2.4

     	  Available from: http://www.gtk.org/

 * libzlib

   This library and the development headers are required for compression
   file support in the 2.0 profile.

b. Building the Software

If you obtained this package as an officially released tarball,
this is very simple, use configure and make:

 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
 make
 make install

Mono supports a JIT engine on x86, SPARC, SPARCv9, S/390,
S/390x, AMD64, ARM and PowerPC systems.

If you obtained this as a snapshot, you will need an existing
Mono installation. To upgrade your installation, unpack both
mono and mcs:

 tar xzf mcs-XXXX.tar.gz
 tar xzf mono-XXXX.tar.gz
 mv mono-XXX mono
 mv mcs-XXX mcs
 cd mono
 ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
 make

The Mono build system is silent for most compilation commands.
To enable a more verbose compile (for example, to pinpoint
problems in your makefiles or your system) pass the V=1 flag to make, like this:

  make V=1

c. Building the software from GIT

If you are building the software from GIT, make sure that you
have up-to-date mcs and mono sources:

If you are an anonymous user:
 git clone git://github.com/mono/mono.git

    If you are a Mono contributors with read/write privileges:
     git clone git@github.com:mono/mono.git

Then, go into the mono directory, and configure:

 cd mono
 ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
 make

For people with non-standard installations of the auto* utils and of
pkg-config (common on misconfigured OSX and windows boxes), you could get
an error like this:

./configure: line 19176: syntax error near unexpected token `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(BASE_DEPENDENCIES,' ...

This means that you need to set the ACLOCAL_FLAGS environment var
when invoking autogen.sh, like this:

 ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I $acprefix/share/aclocal" ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/loca

where $acprefix is the prefix where aclocal has been installed.

This will automatically go into the mcs/ tree and build the
binaries there.

This assumes that you have a working mono installation, and that
there's a C# compiler named 'mcs', and a corresponding IL
runtime called 'mono'. You can use two make variables
EXTERNAL_MCS and EXTERNAL_RUNTIME to override these. e.g., you
can say

make EXTERNAL_MCS=/foo/bar/mcs EXTERNAL_RUNTIME=/somewhere/else/mono

If you don't have a working Mono installation

If you don't have a working Mono installation, an obvious choice
is to install the latest released packages of 'mono' for your
distribution and running autogen.sh; make; make install in the
mono module directory.

You can also try a slightly more risky approach: this may not work,
so start from the released tarball as detailed above.

This works by first getting the latest version of the 'monolite'
distribution, which contains just enough to run the 'mcs'
compiler. You do this with:

 # Run the following line after ./autogen.sh
 make get-monolite-latest

This will download and automatically gunzip and untar the
tarball, and place the files appropriately so that you can then
just run:

 make EXTERNAL_MCS=${PWD}/mcs/class/lib/monolite/gmcs.exe

And that will use the files downloaded by 'make get-monolite-latest.

Testing and Installation

You can run (part of) the mono and mcs testsuites with the command:

 make check

All tests should pass.

If you want more extensive tests, including those that test the
class libraries, you need to re-run 'configure' with the
'--enable-nunit-tests' flag, and try

 make -k check

Expect to find a few testsuite failures. As a sanity check, you
can compare the failures you got with

 http://go-mono.com/tests/displayTestResults.php

You can now install mono with:

 make install

You can verify your installation by using the mono-test-install
script, it can diagnose some common problems with Mono's install.

Failure to follow these steps may result in a broken installation.

d. Configuration Options

The following are the configuration options that someone
building Mono might want to use:

--with-sgen=yes,no

 Generational GC support: Used to enable or disable the
 compilation of a Mono runtime with the SGen garbage collector.

 On platforms that support it, after building Mono, you
 will have both a mono binary and a mono-sgen binary.
 Mono uses Boehm, while mono-sgen uses the Simple
 Generational GC.

--with-gc=[boehm, included, sgen, none]

 Selects the default Boehm garbage collector engine to
 use, the default is the "included" value.

 included: 
 	This is the default value, and its
 	the most feature complete, it will allow Mono
   	to use typed allocations and support the
   	debugger.

 	It is essentially a slightly modified Boehm GC

 boehm:
 	This is used to use a system-install Boehm GC,
 	it is useful to test new features available in
 	Boehm GC, but we do not recommend that people
 	use this, as it disables a few features.

 none:
 	Disables the inclusion of a garbage
   	collector.

--with-tls=__thread,pthread

 Controls how Mono should access thread local storage,
 pthread forces Mono to use the pthread APIs, while
 __thread uses compiler-optimized access to it.

 Although __thread is faster, it requires support from
 the compiler, kernel and libc.   Old Linux systems do
 not support with __thread.

 This value is typically pre-configured and there is no
 need to set it, unless you are trying to debug a
 problem.

--with-sigaltstack=yes,no

 Experimental: Use at your own risk, it is known to
 cause problems with garbage collection and is hard to
 reproduce those bugs.

 This controls whether Mono will install a special
 signal handler to handle stack overflows.   If set to
 "yes", it will turn stack overflows into the
 StackOverflowException.  Otherwise when a stack
 overflow happens, your program will receive a
 segmentation fault.

 The configure script will try to detect if your
 operating system supports this.   Some older Linux
 systems do not support this feature, or you might want
 to override the auto-detection.

--with-static_mono=yes,no

 This controls whether `mono' should link against a
 static library (libmono.a) or a shared library
 (libmono.so). 

 This defaults to yes, and will improve the performance
 of the `mono' program. 

 This only affects the `mono' binary, the shared
 library libmono.so will always be produced for
 developers that want to embed the runtime in their
 application.

--with-xen-opt=yes,no

 The default value for this is `yes', and it makes Mono
 generate code which might be slightly slower on
 average systems, but the resulting executable will run
 faster under the Xen virtualization system.

--with-large-heap=yes,no

 Enable support for GC heaps larger than 3GB.

 This value is set to `no' by default.

--enable-small-config=yes,no

 Enable some tweaks to reduce memory usage and disk footprint at
 the expense of some capabilities. Typically this means that the
 number of threads that can be created is limited (256), that the
 maxmimum heap size is also reduced (256 MB) and other such limitations
 that still make mono useful, but more suitable to embedded devices
 (like mobile phones).

 This value is set to `no' by default.

--with-ikvm-native=yes,no

 Controls whether the IKVM JNI interface library is
 built or not.  This is used if you are planning on
 using the IKVM Java Virtual machine with Mono.

 This defaults to `yes'.

--with-profile4=yes,no

 Whether you want to build the 4.x profile libraries
 and runtime.

 It defaults to `yes'.

--with-moonlight=yes,no

 Whether you want to generate the Silverlight/Moonlight
 libraries and toolchain in addition to the default
 (1.1 and 2.0 APIs).

 This will produce the `smcs' compiler which will reference
 the Silverlight modified assemblies (mscorlib.dll,
 System.dll, System.Code.dll and System.Xml.Core.dll) and turn
 on the LINQ extensions for the compiler.

--with-moon-gc=boehm,sgen

 Select the GC to use for Moonlight.

 boehm:
 	Selects the Boehm Garbage Collector, with the same flags
 	as the regular Mono build. This is the default.

 sgen:
 	Selects the new SGen Garbage Collector, which provides
 	Generational GC support, using the same flags as the
 	mono-sgen build.

 This defaults to `boehm'.

--with-libgdiplus=installed,sibling,

 This is used to configure where should Mono look for
 libgdiplus when running the System.Drawing tests.

 It defaults to `installed', which means that the
 library is available to Mono through the regular
 system setup.

 `sibling' can be used to specify that a libgdiplus
 that resides as a sibling of this directory (mono)
 should be used.

 Or you can specify a path to a libgdiplus.

--disable-shared-memory

 Use this option to disable the use of shared memory in
 Mono (this is equivalent to setting the MONO_DISABLE_SHM
 environment variable, although this removes the feature
 completely).

 Disabling the shared memory support will disable certain
 features like cross-process named mutexes.

--enable-minimal=LIST

 Use this feature to specify optional runtime
 components that you might not want to include.  This
 is only useful for developers embedding Mono that
 require a subset of Mono functionality.

 The list is a comma-separated list of components that
 should be removed, these are:

 aot:
 	Disables support for the Ahead of Time
 	compilation.

 attach:
 	Support for the Mono.Management assembly and the
 	VMAttach API (allowing code to be injected into
 	a target VM)

 com:
 	Disables COM support.

 debug:
 	Drop debugging support.

 decimal:
 	Disables support for System.Decimal.

 full_messages:
 	By default Mono comes with a full table
 	of messages for error codes.   This feature
 	turns off uncommon error messages and reduces
 	the runtime size.

 generics:
 	Generics support.  Disabling this will not
 	allow Mono to run any 2.0 libraries or
 	code that contains generics.

 jit:
 	Removes the JIT engine from the build, this reduces
 	the executable size, and requires that all code
 	executed by the virtual machine be compiled with
 	Full AOT before execution.

 large_code:
 	Disables support for large assemblies.

 logging:
 	Disables support for debug logging.

 pinvoke:
 	Support for Platform Invocation services,
 	disabling this will drop support for any
 	libraries using DllImport.

 portability:
 	Removes support for MONO_IOMAP, the environment
 	variables for simplifying porting applications that 
 	are case-insensitive and that mix the Unix and Windows path separators.

 profiler:
 	Disables support for the default profiler.

 reflection_emit:
 	Drop System.Reflection.Emit support

 reflection_emit_save:
 	Drop support for saving dynamically created
 	assemblies (AssemblyBuilderAccess.Save) in
 	System.Reflection.Emit.

 shadow_copy:
 	Disables support for AppDomain's shadow copies
 	(you can disable this if you do not plan on 
 	using appdomains).

 simd:
 	Disables support for the Mono.SIMD intrinsics
 	library.

 ssa:
 	Disables compilation for the SSA optimization
 	framework, and the various SSA-based
   	optimizations.

--enable-llvm
--enable-loadedllvm

 This enables the use of LLVM as a code generation engine
 for Mono.  The LLVM code generator and optimizer will be 
 used instead of Mono's built-in code generator for both
 Just in Time and Ahead of Time compilations.

 See the http://www.mono-project.com/Mono_LLVM for the 
 full details and up-to-date information on this feature.

 You will need to have an LLVM built that Mono can link
 against,

 The --enable-loadedllvm variant will make the llvm backend
 into a runtime-loadable module instead of linking it directly
 into the main mono binary.

--enable-big-arrays

 This enables the use arrays whose indexes are larger
 than Int32.MaxValue.   

 By default Mono has the same limitation as .NET on
 Win32 and Win64 and limits array indexes to 32-bit
 values (even on 64-bit systems).

 In certain scenarios where large arrays are required,
 you can pass this flag and Mono will be built to
 support 64-bit arrays.

 This is not the default as it breaks the C embedding
 ABI that we have exposed through the Mono development
 cycle.

--enable-parallel-mark

 Use this option to enable the garbage collector to use
 multiple CPUs to do its work.  This helps performance
 on multi-CPU machines as the work is divided across CPUS.

 This option is not currently the default as we have
 not done much testing with Mono.

--enable-dtrace

 On Solaris and MacOS X builds a version of the Mono
 runtime that contains DTrace probes and can
 participate in the system profiling using DTrace.

--disable-dev-random

 Mono uses /dev/random to obtain good random data for
 any source that requires random numbers.   If your
 system does not support this, you might want to
 disable it.

 There are a number of runtime options to control this
 also, see the man page.

--enable-nacl

 This configures the Mono compiler to generate code
 suitable to be used by Google's Native Client:

 	 http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

 Currently this is used with Mono's AOT engine as
 Native Client does not support JIT engines yet.

Using Mono
=============

Once you have installed the software, you can run a few programs:
- runtime engine
  
  mono program.exe
- C# compiler
  
  mcs program.cs
- CIL Disassembler
  
  monodis program.exe
See the man pages for mono(1), mint(1), monodis(1) and mcs(2)
for further details.

Directory Roadmap
====================

docs/
Technical documents about the Mono runtime.

data/
Configuration files installed as part of the Mono runtime.

mono/
The core of the Mono Runtime.

 metadata/
 	The object system and metadata reader.

 mini/
 	The Just in Time Compiler.

 dis/
 	CIL executable Disassembler

 cli/
 	Common code for the JIT and the interpreter.

 io-layer/
 	The I/O layer and system abstraction for 
 	emulating the .NET IO model.

 cil/
 	Common Intermediate Representation, XML
 	definition of the CIL bytecodes.

 interp/
 	Interpreter for CLI executables (obsolete).

 arch/
 	Architecture specific portions.

man/

 Manual pages for the various Mono commands and programs.

samples/

 Some simple sample programs on uses of the Mono
 runtime as an embedded library.

scripts/

 Scripts used to invoke Mono and the corresponding program.

runtime/

 A directory that contains the Makefiles that link the
 mono/ and mcs/ build systems.

../olive/

 If the directory ../olive is present (as an
 independent checkout) from the Mono module, that
 directory is automatically configured to share the
 same prefix than this module gets.