SA and disassemblers

[Tom Rodriguez]

On Aug 27, 2009, at 11:20 AM, John Coomes wrote:

> 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?

I built it last time using cross compiling and it worked just fine so  
I don't see any reason to expect difficulty.

tom

>
> -John
>