Decompilation
Doug Evans
dje@transmeta.com
Mon Dec 2 10:27:00 GMT 2002
J. Grant writes:
> I am currently working on some decompilation methods/ideas. I have been
> looking at the suitability of implementing using the GNU tools as a
> base. I realise this is a very complex process, so would like to ask
> peoples opinions before diving in and coding in all the wrong places.
>
> I would like to achive something similar to the way that gcc is the
> front end for compiling. For each of the stages below I would welcome
> sugested areas of binutils/GCC that I should focus my work on. I have
> been modifying objdump to produce the intermediate code. Clearly a lot
> of new code needs to be written to complete this work. If anyone has
> sugestions for the direction I should take this is welcome.
>
> Stage 1: Front end
> Input machine code binary
> Disassemble
> Abstract intermediate code generation
> Intermediate code output
What if you used cgen for stage 1?
I've always wanted to add the rtl to the opcodes files of cgen (*1),
but haven't had a reason or impetus to.
With that (and some suitable cover/utility fns) I believe you could easily
go from binary to intermediate code (*2). Only for the targets that cgen
supports of course.
(*1): At some point I've been expecting binutils to want to boot cgen
out of libopcodes. I dunno. But I've always wanted to create libcgen too.
There's a lot more ISA utilities that can be provided with cgen and should
be made available in the form of a library, but whether they belong in
libopcodes and shipped with binutils is certainly debatable.
(*2): pedantic: insert all the usual caveats of determining what's code
and what's data.
> Stage 2: Universal decompilation machine (UDM)
> CFG generation
> CFG analysis
> Data Format analysis
>
> Stage 3: Backend HLL target
> HLL constructs identified
> HLL output
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