[LLVMdev] how to transform elf binary to llvm IR?

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

On 7/17/2015 2:09 AM, 慕冬亮 wrote:
> I want to transform elf binary to llvm IR, and do some instrumentation 
> based on llvm.
> Is there any tool which can do the transformation?

It sounds like what you want to do is some form of binary translation, 
and, quite frankly, LLVM is going to be a poor choice. LLVM is designed 
to be a compiler IR, and its optimizations rely on source-level hinting 
information that is irrevocably lost when converted to machine code. 
While there do exist several projects that can do some conversion from 
machine code to IR (Dagger, Fracture, MCSema), none of them are 
sufficiently robust (to my knowledge). In comparison to projects whose 
raison d'être is binary translation (e.g., Valgrind, Pin), you're not 
going to see sufficient value-add in using LLVM to outweigh the fact 
that you're using a very non-robust solution.

If you really want to use LLVM, I'd advise using clang to compile the 
C/C++ code and do instrumentation passes within the clang compilation 
process. I would not advise trying to do instrumentation via decompiling 
binaries to LLVM IR.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist