Capstone is an open source disassembler [1] already used by
other projects (like QEMU).
gem5 is already capable of disassembling instructions. Every StaticInst
is supposed to define a generateDisassembly method which returns the
instruction mnemonic (opcode + operand list) as a string.
This "distributed" implementation of a disassembler relies
on the developer to properly populate the metadata fields
of the base instruction class.
The growing complexity of the ISA code and the massive reuse
of base classes beyond their intended use has led to a
disassembling logic which contains several bugs.
By allowing a tracer to rely on a third party disassembler, we fill the
intruction trace with a more trustworthy instruction stream.
This will make any trace parsing tool to work better and it will
also allow us to spot/fix our own bugs by comparing instruction
traces with native vs custom disassembler
[1]: http://www.capstone-engine.org/
Change-Id: I3c4db5072c03d2731265d0398d3863c101dcb180
Signed-off-by: Giacomo Travaglini <giacomo.travaglini@arm.com>
