Continuing my journey into Rotor, I finally got my RedHat Linux 9.0 running through VirtualPC 5.2. Thanks again to Charles Cook and Joseph Cooney for their assistance. Once I created ISO images from the RedHat CDs, and used those for the install, everything worked flawlessly.
Along with Andrew, I have purchased the “Understanding the Linux Kernel†book to look at porting the Rotor codebase to RedHat Linux 8.0/9.0 (currently, a version runs on 7.2, but fails on 8.0 and 9.0). While doing research on porting the PAL code for Rotor, I re-discovered this article from the July, 2002 MSDN magazine issue called Shared Source CLI Provides Source Code for a FreeBSD Implementation of .NET by Jason Whittington. One item really struck me from this article:
Porting the Shared Source CLI to a new platform involves more than just porting the PAL however, because of the use of JIT compilation. JIT compilers are by their very nature tied to a particular processor family in addition to any OS dependencies underneath them. The Shared Source CLI JIT compiler gets around this problem with an ingenious system of macros that emits x86 machine code when compiled on Intel platforms and defaults to a set of ANSI C functions otherwise.
Of course, a lot of this RedHat Linux porting has already been done through the Mono project. I also retrieved the latest version of Mono (v. 26) in order to build this system. I will let you know my results of testing (one claim is that v.26 passes all Rotor tests now -- see my Rotor test results for FreeBSD 4.8). Speaking of Mono, I also found Miguel de Icaza's Blog (if you don't know, Miguel is the Principal Architect of Mono). Subscribed.
