[LLVMdev] Looking for ideas on how to make llvm-objdump handle both arm and thumb disassembly from the same object file

[Renato Golin]

On 6 August 2014 21:18, Kevin Enderby <enderby at apple.com> wrote:
> Also agreed.  But can you or anyone else think of other tools that would
> need this logic?  Hate to do a whole bunch of work adding to the lower
> layers just to make objdump a bit cleaner.

Mainly lldb, I guess, which probably has to do some sort of magic, too.


> As a maintainer of darwin’s otool(1) for some 20 plus years and plugging in
> some 9 or more different disassemblers the use if two llvm disassembler’s for
> 32-bit arm is no big deal at all.  Heck it still has the old arm disassemblers in
> it and many other old ones and it is very stable and I rarely if ever have to touch
> those interfaces.

I don't think it's that much uglier to use multiple disassemblers for
the same target when you already use for different targets, and as you
said, you already have a way to use a collection of them on demand in
otool, so that wouldn't be much of a new hack.

But I can't opine on objdump's design decisions. All I can say is that
I don't think the changes in the ARM back-end wouldn't be that
problematic if you decide to merge the disassemblers.

cheers,
--renato