[LLVMdev] disassembly/decompiling

[Howard Chu]

Chris Lattner wrote:
>
> On Oct 26, 2009, at 1:00 AM, Howard Chu wrote:
>
>> Hi, just read the LLVM 2.6 release announcement, the bit about llvm-
>> mc caught
>> my attention. I've been looking for a tool to disassemble x86 object
>> files
>> into an IR and then reassemble them into x86_64 object code. The
>> immediate use
>> for them would be to convert driver blobs that some vendors provide
>> for their
>> hardware (e.g. the Lucent modem driver) so they can be used in a 64
>> bit
>> kernel. From the release announcement it looks like llvm-mc isn't
>> ready for
>> this purpose yet, was just curious if this kind of task was anywhere
>> on its
>> roadmap. Thanks...
>
> We don't have anything like that planned, but do plan to do an
> assembler and disassembler.  The disassembler (for x86-16/32/64) is
> iterating on review comments before it goes in.  The assembler is
> currently being built out and will initially support macho.
> Translating X86-32 to X86-64 sounds tricky but it could probably be
> built on some of this infrastructure.

Thanks for the response. I guess the real question is how much functionality 
the disassembler will have. If it only disassembles to assembly source files 
that's one thing. If it can go all the way to the LLVM IR that should make 
going to anything else pretty trivial.

-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/