Add mono support

[maryamariyan]

From @alexanderkyte on Apr 27, 2018, 10:58 AM PDT

In order for our models to be useful on mobile platforms, we're going to need to get this working on mono. It'll probably simply be some infrastructure work.

I can address it, as I'm a mono runtime engineer.

Currently on backlog / low-priority

[maryamariyan]

From @eerhardt on Apr 27, 2018, 12:41 PM PDT

Do you know what doesn't work on mono? We are currently producing netstandard2.0 libraries, which should run on any modern .NET platform.

[maryamariyan]

From @alexanderkyte on Apr 30, 2018, 9:57 AM PDT

It's a bit of build hard coding right now. I also need to check that mono's green when doing this with AOT and on the mobile/restricted platforms.

[maryamariyan]

From @eerhardt on Apr 30, 2018, 11:18 AM PDT

Today, we only support x64 architectures (since we are using some SIMD instructions). If you want this to run on mobile, I think it may be some considerable work to support ARM/ARM64

[borgdylan]

@alexanderkyte is there anything that precludes me fro running this on mono on a Linux x64 machine? Given that I run in JIT mode, and that mono happens to support System.Numerics.Vectors now I think it shoudl work ok but am not entirely sure.

[alexanderkyte]

@kumpera

[alexanderkyte]

Right now, mono seems perfectly capable of running binaries produced from this repo. The build infrastructure is very closely wedded to dotnetcore though. We fail to AOT the codegen functions, but that's to be expected. Everything else in inference comes through fine. You have to make sure newtonsoft is in the MONO_PATH though. This will probably be better to work with in a statically linked, aot context.

[raffaeler]

I believe that ARM support is strategic from now on. Mobile and Embedded are just the most obvious examples. But the growing request for ARM servers (due to very low power consumption motherboards) are another example of what will happen soon (IMHO).
On my side, I would be perfectly happy if there were ARM libraries for the NetCore 2.1.

[dotMorten]

Today, we only support x64 architectures

That seems rather problematic for the new ARM64 devices which will only run x86, ARMv7 and ARMv8, but won't be able to run x64 apps.
It would be good with UWP support as well.

[enghch]

My main use case is running on ARM (Raspberry Pi 3 or similar) on Linux in .NET Core 2.1. I also have a UWP IoT Core ARM use case. So just another vote for ARM support.

[kumpera]

I was not able to run a dotnet core compiled model under mono. Is that expected to work?

[abgoswam]

DRI RESPONSE : moving to backlog (skip triage) since it requires multiple platform support x86, ARM

[dcostea]

I believe that ARM support is strategic from now on. Mobile and Embedded are just the most obvious examples. But the growing request for ARM servers (due to very low power consumption motherboards) are another example of what will happen soon (IMHO).
On my side, I would be perfectly happy if there were ARM libraries for the NetCore 2.1.

I totally agree with Rafaelle, hope to see that soon.