Updates on libcapstone?

Updates on libcapstone?

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Richard,

We are using libcapstone since almost 3 years for the arm/i386/ppc
'base' architectures.
The library is still optional in ./configure.
I wonder if we can make it a strong requisite, this way we could
get rid of disas/{arm.c,arm-a64.cc,i386.c,ppc.c} and the disas/libvixl
submodule, then having C++ compiler is not necessary anymore.

As of the release 4.0, the list of supported architectures is:

"ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), Ethereum VM, M68K, Mips, PPC, Sparc, SystemZ,
TMS320C64X, M680X, XCore and X86 (including X86_64)."

m68k/mips/sparc/s390x are other candidates.

I remember you had a series related to capstone, but eventually there
was a problem so you postponed it until some patches were merged
upstream, do you remember?

Thanks for any update,

Phil.

Re: Updates on libcapstone?

[Richard Henderson]

On 7/9/20 6:07 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> I remember you had a series related to capstone, but eventually there
> was a problem so you postponed it until some patches were merged
> upstream, do you remember?

I do.

My biggest problem with libcapstone is that it doesn't have an automated way to
merge from upstream llvm, so it doesn't get any new architecture updates.

What I think we should do is drop libcapstone entirely, and use libllvm
directly.  It's a bit more code to use, but llvm is where new architectures
(and architecture extensions) get merged.

A mere matter of coding...


r~

Re: Updates on libcapstone?

[Thomas Huth]

On 10/07/2020 21.30, Richard Henderson wrote:
> On 7/9/20 6:07 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> I remember you had a series related to capstone, but eventually there
>> was a problem so you postponed it until some patches were merged
>> upstream, do you remember?
> 
> I do.
> 
> My biggest problem with libcapstone is that it doesn't have an automated way to
> merge from upstream llvm, so it doesn't get any new architecture updates.
> 
> What I think we should do is drop libcapstone entirely, and use libllvm
> directly.  It's a bit more code to use, but llvm is where new architectures
> (and architecture extensions) get merged.
> 
> A mere matter of coding...

Maybe a nice topic for the next GSoC?

 Thomas