1. Installation
2. Using Mono
3. Directory Roadmap
+ 4. git submodules maintenance
1. Compilation and Installation
===============================
a. Build Requirements
---------------------
- To build Mono, you will need the following components:
-
- * pkg-config
-
- Available from: http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/pkgconfig
-
- * glib 2.4
-
- Available from: http://www.gtk.org/
-
On Itanium, you must obtain libunwind:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/libunwind/download.php4
* libgdiplus
If you want to get support for System.Drawing, you will need to get
- Libgdiplus.
+ 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
make
make install
- Mono supports a JIT engine on x86, SPARC, SPARCv9, S/390, AMD64, ARM
- and PowerPC systems.
+ 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
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
make
- c. Building the software from SVN
+ 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 SVN, make sure that you
+ If you are building the software from GIT, make sure that you
have up-to-date mcs and mono sources:
- svn co svn+ssh://USER@mono-cvs.ximian.com/source/trunk/mono
- svn co svn+ssh://USER@mono-cvs.ximian.com/source/trunk/mcs
+ 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:
./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 $acprefix is the prefix where aclocal has been installed.
+
This will automatically go into the mcs/ tree and build the
binaries there.
distribution, which contains just enough to run the 'mcs'
compiler. You do this with:
+ # Run the following line after ./autogen.sh
make get-monolite-latest
This will download and automatically gunzip and untar the
tarball, and place the files appropriately so that you can then
just run:
- make
+ make EXTERNAL_MCS=${PWD}/mcs/class/lib/monolite/gmcs.exe
- To ensure that you're using the 'monolite' distribution, you can
- also try passing EXTERNAL_MCS=false on the make command-line.
+ 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 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. Common Configuration Options
- -------------------------------
+ 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 garbage collector engine to use, the
- default is the "included" value.
+ Selects the default Boehm garbage collector engine to
+ use, the default is the "included" value.
included:
This is the default value, and its
Boehm GC, but we do not recommend that people
use this, as it disables a few features.
- sgen:
- The under-development Generational GC for
- Mono, do not use this in production.
-
none:
Disables the inclusion of a garbage
collector.
--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
systems do not support this feature, or you might want
to override the auto-detection.
- --with-static-mono=yes,no
+ --with-static_mono=yes,no
This controls whether `mono' should link against a
static library (libmono.a) or a shared library
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
This defaults to `yes'.
- --with-preview=yes,no
+ --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.
- Whether you want to build libraries that are still not
- completed (The 2.0 APIs). It defaults to `yes'.
+ This defaults to `boehm'.
--with-libgdiplus=installed,sibling,<path>
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
Disables support for the Ahead of Time
compilation.
- profiler:
- Disables support for the default profiler.
+ 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.
- debug:
- Drop debugging support.
+ 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
- large_code:
- Disables support for large assemblies.
+ reflection_emit_save:
+ Drop support for saving dynamically created
+ assemblies (AssemblyBuilderAccess.Save) in
+ System.Reflection.Emit.
- logging:
- Disables support for debug logging.
+ shadow_copy:
+ Disables support for AppDomain's shadow copies
+ (you can disable this if you do not plan on
+ using appdomains).
- com:
- Disables COM support.
+ simd:
+ Disables support for the Mono.SIMD intrinsics
+ library.
ssa:
Disables compilation for the SSA optimization
framework, and the various SSA-based
optimizations.
- generics:
- Generics support. Disabling this will not
- allow Mono to run any 2.0 libraries or
- code that contains generics.
-
+ --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
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.
2. Using Mono
=============
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.
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.
+
+
+4. Git submodules maintenance
+=============================
+
+Read documentation at http://mono-project.com/Git_Submodule_Maintenance