[Pnet-developers] [pnet] PNET_TOOLS

[Lothar Heinrich]

Hi,

I'm working on installing/porting the portable.NET runtime engine to
snapgear running on leonII-sparcV8 hardware (http://www.gaisler.com/ ...
Leon2)

First step is to execute simple CIL programms, things like GUI
components are not needed.

After this, i have to modify the interpreter in that way, that it is
able to use a special modified instruction set. The goal is, to compute
range checks implicit in hardware in an extra execution stage.

My fist attempt to cross compile portable.NET to the specific hardware
seems to be successfuly. At least compiling the pnet-distribution with
sparc-linux-gcc finishd without errors or warnings, all needed
executables are created (ilrun, ...) Unfortunately at this time I can't
verify the compiled programms cause I'm not able to install these files
on the snapgear distribution. Snapgear creates an image of the whole
distribution, this image is loaded to the development board
(GR-XC3S-1500) and startet by an external programm connected via com
port.

Currently I'm trying to include all needed parts of portable.NET into
the snapgear distribution. During compiling snapgear, portable.NET
should be also compiled. After this, it should be easy to execute ilrun,
caus it will be part of the snapgear image.

my questions:

Does anybody have tried something similar?

Is it posible to modify the portable.NET interpreter to use a special
instruction set. (for examle a modified load, which loads upper bounds
in a special register)

During code review i found usage of the environment? variable PNET_TOOLS
in Makefile.in. How can i bypass a value (false) to auto_gen.sh to
create a proper Makefile.in for just compiling the runtime engine?

Which programms and libraries are essential to execute CIL programms?
I.e. I don't need a C# comiler. Am I on the right track, just focusing
on ilrun?

Finally i want to inform about a possible bug in the build process of
the pnet directory:

During my work, i tried to compile pnet from cvs. Therefor i called
auto_gen.sh, "./configure --prefix=/somewhere/in/my/home/dir" and make
During "make install" running as normal user the following error ocours:
mkdir -p ... unable to make directory /gc ...
It seams, that somewere in the auto_gen/configure part a needed variable
is not set.
Compiling pnet from tar.gz package finished without errors.
Compiling pnet from tar.gz _after_ calling auto_gen.sh results in the
same error.

best regards,
Lothar Heinrich, student at TU-Graz - Austria