* Andi Kleen <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Yeah, so udis86 also seems to be a pretty old, relatively stale library
> > with no
> > support for new instructions AFAICS.
>
> There are lots of new instructions in pull requests on github.
>
> But yes the author seems to be a bit slow in pulling.
>
> >
> > So I'd rather encourage librarizing one of the x86 instruction decoders in
> > arch/x86/, and adding pretty-printing functionality to it. The code can
> > already
> > see instruction boundaries, which is the hardest part.
> >
> > That would also be better supported on non-x86 architectures in the long
> > run:
> >
> > triton:~/tip> find arch/ -name insn.c | xargs ls -l
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 mingo mingo 30244 Mar 29 11:24 arch/arm64/kernel/insn.c
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 mingo mingo 1347 Dec 8 06:27 arch/arm/kernel/insn.c
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 mingo mingo 15123 Mar 30 12:31 arch/x86/lib/insn.c
> >
> > Such an in-kernel-repo library could also be used by live kernel debuggers
> > such as
> > kgdb/kdb, oops/crash-time disassembly printout, etc.
> >
> > ... so how about that direction instead?
>
> It's a major project. Who is gonna work on it? Are you volunteering?
As a maintainer I don't have much free time and me writing code for every
technical disagreement doesn't scale in any case, but I'm responsible for
creating
the environment and incentives for people to eventually work on such
enhancements.
My main tool to create such an environment is to convince people, if that tool
doesn't work then my secondary tool is to say 'no'. If we merge udis86 support
we
remove one big incentive for people to factor out and enhance the already
existing
in-kernel disassemblers - not good.
Also, you are exaggerating the technical difficulties a lot (which is sadly a
well
known modus operandi of yours when you don't get your way in technical
discussions, and which conflicts with the Linux project's 'can do' attitude
frequently), I've seen in-kernel disassembler pretty-printing patches on lkml
as
well, so clearly it's possible and desirable.
Thanks,
Ingo
