Re: QEMU plugin past, present and future examples

["Philippe Mathieu-Daudé" <philmd@linaro.org>]

Hi Robert,

On 11/6/24 18:53, Robert Henry wrote:
> QEMU plugin experts:
> 
> A few years I wrote a plugin for QEMU that saves the instruction stream 
> to a file for offline analysis.  QEMU could fly along at about 10MIPS 
> and the disk would soon fill up with large protobuf files.  The offline 
> analysis runs at about 50kIPS, and does a variety of analyses, such as 
> simple disassembly that includes kernel source file name and line 
> number, popcount analyses of displacements, Markov chain probabilities, 
> etc.
> 
> To get the speed up, I narrowed the scope of the plugin to only work 
> with ARM64, although there's still a lot of support for x86_64.
> 
>   I have not kept pace with the QEMU plugin API changes, if any, to 
> support vectors, masks, and so forth.
> 
>   *
>     I did this work for my current employer, Microsoft.
>   *
>     I will retire in 3 weeks.`
>   *
>     Nobody in Microsoft seems interested in picking up this work.
>   *
>     I'm working with our open source office to get this more widely
>     released.
> 
> The plugin code that runs in QEMU is complex, but relatively 
> straightforward. The offline analysis code is idiosyncratic and somewhat 
> fragile.

Thanks for trying to share your work with the community!

> Do the QEMU plugin experts (cc'ed here mostly) have a suggestion for 
> which public git repository service has worked "best" for other plugins 
> that are not currently part of the QEMU source tree?

Cc'ing few more developer familiar with plugins and the source code
organisation.

> I will try to get a repo in github.com/microsoft/ but I do not know what 
> is involved.
> 
> Robert Henry
> robhenry@microsoft.com
> rrh.henry@gmail.com
> https://github.com/robertHenry6bev <https://github.com/robertHenry6bev>

Regards,

Phil.