SA and disassemblers

[John Coomes]

Tom Rodriguez (Thomas.Rodriguez at Sun.COM) wrote:
> One of the limitations of the current SA is that it doesn't have a  
> disassembler for amd64 which makes looking at 64 bit cores somewhat  
> challenging.  Instead of trying to implement a full disassembler for  
> x64 in Java I think we should switch the SA to using hsdis-arch for  
> the decoding.  It requires a minor extension to the  
> decode_instructions interface so that we can disassemble a buffer of  
> code that's not physically located where the code came from.  I've got  
> a working version of this that also fixes the printing to match up  
> better with what the JVM itself prints.  I was planning on blowing  
> away the other disassemblers completely because they don't really fit  
> into the new model.  I thought I'd float this before finishing it to  
> see if there are any concerns.
> ...

Only concern is hsdis on windows.  I haven't tried it, but the
hsdis/README indicates it's a pain to get it built on windows,
recommending a cross-compile on linux as the best alternative.  Is
that still true?

-John