[LLVMdev] converting x86 instructions to LLVM instructions

[Andrew Haley]

Alexandre Gouraud wrote:

> Thanks for commenting. I feel like I have to justify why I don't want to use
> QEMU, which is fine since my choice is not frozen actually.
> 
> QEMU is much more than what I need for dynamically instrumenting software.
> My goal is automated testing to find bugs, which can quickly be intensive in
> term of computational load. Thus I am trying to get the smallest (and
> fastest) tool.
> Even using QEMU, I am not sure the piece of code already exists. And if it
> does, I can still extract it and put where I want. My question is really :
> is it a long work (several months) or is it just a matter of two weeks? And
> if it does not already exists, could it mean it is a nonsense, then why?
> 
> Finally about your proposition using valgrind, I think I will stick to
> windows tools because this is what I know better. But it was ironic, wasn't
> it?

The problem is that x86 has a very complex instruction set, and decoding it
all takes a lot of software.  Valgrind already has the tools to do this
decoding, so it's definitely something I would consider.  After all,
Valgrind already does much of what you're trying to do.

Andrew.