RFC: AArch64 Disassembler: Annotate undefined instructions

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Alice,

> I think Richard and I came away with a different impression of how this
> conversation concluded.  We thought that the patch was not accepted and would
> be dropped after this response, but I've just discovered from the release notes
> that it was actually committed.

Ah, sorry.  That was obviously me not reading your emails correctly.


> The issues I see with it are that it:
> - Conflates 32-but values with 64-bit address, with the full address displayed as:
>      411030:       0040065c        .inst   0x0040065c ; [func1]
>      411034:       00000000        udf     #0
 > - Only supports symbols at addresses between 0 and 2^32-1

True.  I suppose that the heuristic could be improved to test to see if a
following 32-bit value could be combined with the current 32-bit value to
make a valid symbolic address.  But if you are already unhappy with the
feature then maybe this is going a step too far.


> - Only supports 60% of the addresses in that range, since 40% of values are
>    recognised as instructions.

> - Interprets content as data values when the user explicitly requested the
>    content to be interpreted as instructions.

Does it ?  The heuristic does check to see that it is in the MAP_DATA state
before displaying the annotation, so values inserted as instructions should
not be annotated.


> Now that it's made it into a release, it might be a bit late to remove this.
> However, if we keep it then I'd certainly want to explain some of the above
> issues in the code comment, to reduce confusion there.

I have no problems with that.  It might also be useful to update the documentation
to indicate the potential problems with the feature.

Cheers
   Nick