Re: [RFC] [PATCH 1/7] User Space Breakpoint Assistance Layer (UBP)

[Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@redhat.com>]

Jim Keniston wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 10:58 -0500, Masami Hiramatsu wrote:
>> Jim Keniston wrote:
>>> Not really.  For #3 (boosting), you need to know everything for #2,  
>>> plus be able to compute the length of each instruction -- which we can  
>>> now do for x86.  To emulate an instruction (#4), you need to replicate  
>>> what it does, side-effects and all.  The x86 instruction set seems to  
>>> be adding new floating-point instructions all the time, and I bet even  
>>> Masami doesn't know what they all do, but so far, they all seem to  
>>> adhere to the instruction-length rules encoded in Masami's instruction  
>>> decoder.
>>
>> Actually, current x86 decoder doesn't support FP(x87) instructions.(even
>> it already supported AVX) But I think it's not so hard to add it.
>>
> 
> At one point I verified that it worked for all the x87 instructions in
> libm:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/utrace-devel/2009-March/msg00031.html
> I'm pretty sure I tested mmx instructions as well.  But I guess this was
> before you rearranged the opcode tables.
> 
> Yeah, it wouldn't be hard to add back in, at least for purposes of
> computing instruction lengths.

objdump -d /lib/libm.so.6  | awk -f arch/x86/tools/distill.awk | ./test_get_len 
Succeed: decoded and checked 37198 instructions

Hmm, yeah, that's already supported :-D.

Thank you,

-- 
Masami Hiramatsu

Software Engineer
Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.
Software Solutions Division

e-mail: mhiramat@redhat.com