On 14 February 2013 21:10, Richard Henderson <r...@twiddle.net> wrote: > The only options I can see going forward are > > 1) Provide a configure time option to link to the "system" libopcodes. > 2) Use someone else's (bsd licensed?) disassember. > 3) Rearrange relevant translators so that they can disassemble and > not translate. > > The complete solution could be a combination of all three.
4) Since we only do disassembly for debug logging, have our debug logging just log hex, with postprocessing by a script that runs objdump or something > To me, option (1) means that qemu the project is not "infecting" the > binary with GPLv3, but requiring the user to make that choice. Which > seems fine; those that have moral objections to v3 can simply not use > that configure option. It's a bit awkward that most distributions don't > package up libopcodes for install, but if you manually build binutils > you'll have it done. I'm not hugely convinced by the idea of "here's a configure switch to produce binaries you can't legally distribute". > I hope we'll all agree that option (3) is not ideal, since having a > separate disassembler works as a check against the translator. However, > for odd parts that will never be a host it's not a totally unreasonable > solution, as it at least provides *some* disassembly. > > As for option (2), I'm not even sure what to suggest. I suppose there's > some part of LLVM that does textual disassembly. Whether we want to > drag that in as a submodule or just require it to be installed and > notice it at configure time, I have no opinion. But because of the odd > parts, (2) can't be the only option. I had a look at the LLVM disassembler the other day. From a quick glance it seems like LLVM drives the disassembler off a generalised machine description language (which it also uses for various other things), so getting the disassemblers would also require us to pull in quite a bit of LLVM infrastructure for parsing the machine descriptions. It didn't look particularly easy, but this is just from 15 minutes browsing a source tree, so if anybody more LLVM aware here has an opinion do say. > But most of all I think we should have a plan. Agreed. -- PMM
