New Mono Runtime Features

With Mono 2.8 we want to make it very easy for developers to use the LLVM powered Mono engine and the new Mono Garbage Collector.

Previously users had to build Mono from source code and choose as part of their build whether they wanted the Mono VM to be powered by LLVM or not and whether they wanted to use the Boehm GC or the new Generational GC. Typically users would have to keep multiple parallel Mono installations.

This is no longer necessary.

Mono 2.8 by default behaves just like any other Mono, by default you get the regular fast Mono JIT with the Boehm GC.

You can then pass the --llvm flag to instruct the Mono runtime to use LLVM for code generation (much slower to JIT, but produces better code for long-running applications or compute intensive applications).

To use the new garbage collector you pass the --gc=sgen command line argument.

New MONO_ENV_OPTIONS

We wanted users to try LLVM, SGen or the LLVM/Sgen combination without having to modify all of their launch scripts or existing tools so we introduced a new environment variable that Mono parses on startup, the MONO_ENV_OPTIONS variable.

Mono will parse the contents of the MONO_ENV_OPTIONS variable as if the arguments had been passed in the command line, so you could do a full bootstrap of Mono's class libraries with both by doing:

	$ export MONO_ENV_OPTIONS="--llvm --gc=sgen"
	$ make
	

How to test LLVM and SGen

Update: Both the --gc=sgen and --llvm options depend on your architecture and operating system being supported by SGen and LLVM and depend on you compiling your runtime with these features.

SGen will be automatically enabled if your OS/architecture is supported when you run configure.

LLVM requires the installation of the LLVM libraries. We strongly recommend that you use our modified version of LLVM that has been extended to support various constructs required by .NET.

For more information on compiling LLVM and building your Mono with it, see our web page