Re: [Capstone] Feedback request for new architecture updater

[Thomas Huth]

On 12/01/2023 17.24, Rot127 wrote:
> I currently work on a new updater for architecture modules in Capstone.
>
> The current update process has the problem that it is a lot of manual work.
> Syncing the information from LLVM to Capstone requires a one to translate a 
> lot of C++ to C code and fix a ton of build errors.
> This lead to architecture modules not getting updated. So there are many new 
> instructions in Capstone which are not supported.
>
> The new updater will take away as much manual work as possible.
> It does this by translating most C++ to C via a little translation tool and 
> uses refactored LLVM-TableGen backends which emit directly the code Capstone 
> needs.
> Currently it is in a early stage but it is ready to receive some feedback.
>
> If anyone finds the time to take a look at it and write down their thoughts, 
> suggestions or improvement ideas, I would be very grateful.
>
> Capstone draft PR: https://github.com/capstone-engine/capstone/pull/1949

 Hi!

Thanks for the heads up! I see your pull request addresses the ARM part of 
Capstone, so I CC:-ed qemu-arm@nongnu.org in case anybody there wants to 
give it a try.

From my personal point of view, what I really would love to see is an 
update for sparc and mips in the next version of Capstone, so we could 
finally get of the old disas/sparc.c and disas/mips.c files in QEMU (which 
were still disassembling more instructions than Capstone 4.0, so we kept 
them ... but AFAIK the upstream LLVM code implemented many missing 
instructions in the past years, so if Capstone gets refreshed, it should be 
good enough to replace the old code now).

Do you have any plans to work on Sparc and Mips any time soon? If not, do 
you have some short (shell) instructions how the update process 
theoretically works - maybe someone else can help?

 Thanks,
  Thomas