What’s changed?
IBM Open Source and Ecosystem Developers ported .Net 7 for IBM Power Systems and shared the code with Red Hat to productise for support. Read about it from IBM Dev blog here
.Net 7 using the Mono runtime is quite different from the Mono project that has been around for many years. Mono was a complete reimplementation of the whole .NET stack back when that was still proprietary: the runtime, the C# compiler, the standard libraries, everything.
Who Provides Support for .Net on IBM Power Systems?
Red Hat support the original .NET stack used by Microsoft, which is fully open-source (since .NET Core) and includes two optional runtimes: CoreCLR and Mono (since .NET 5). By default, CorecCLR runtime is for Intel, whilst Mono runtime is for other (Power) platforms. Read Red Hat’s blog here
What’s it mean?
This means that for those components that users and user applications interact with most directly (the “dotnet” command line tool itself, the C# compiler, the standard libraries, but also components like ASP.NET Core), we use the identical sources (and to a large extent, even identical .DLL binaries) as are used on Intel. Only the CoreCLR runtime used under the covers is different. This means that most users shouldn’t even notice any difference.
What’s Microsoft say about it?
Read Microsoft’s blog here
“64-bit IBM Power support
In addition to x64 architecture (64-bit Intel/AMD), ARM64 (64-bit ARM) and s390x (64-bit IBM Z), .NET is now also available for the ppc64le (64-bit IBM Power) architecture targeting RHEL 8.7 and RHEL 9.1.
With the availability to now run natively on Power, the 25,000 plus IBM Power customers can consolidate existing .NET apps on Windows x86 to run on the same Power platform as their IBM i and AIX business apps and databases. Doing so can significantly improve sustainability with up to a 5x smaller carbon footprint combined with on-premises pay-as-you-go scaling for RHEL and OpenShift capacity while delivering industry leading end-to-end-enterprise transaction and data security.“
That is a very different scenario from what we had with the Mono project. Many things were different, and many C# applications needed to be explicitly ported to Mono to run.
Mono was never officially supported, while we now have full enterprise-level 24/7 support for .NET 7 by Red Hat.
Further .Net and Mono project information
Both are available on IBM Power Systems
Microsoft .Net Home
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/
Wikipedia .Net
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET
Mono Home
Mono Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
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