How to extract Linux kernel data objects statically? - data-structures

I am trying to figure out the easiest way to extract kernel data objects using static analysis tools, I found CIL as one option but looks like its more embedded in to GCC and may not be feasible when we need to run it with cross compiler. I wonder if any other C parser would help me for doing such task.
Could someone please recommend me a tool/utility to do static analysis of the kernel source code.

Did you try to explore the parser in clang. I have the same demand, some people refer me to clang. Haven't got time to get into it yet.

Related

statically compile a Nim program in macOS

I'm writing a program in Nim using the zip/zipfiles library, which relies on libzip(|2|4).dylib.
My question is primarily for macOS, but guidance for Linux is also welcome.
How can I compile it to have a statically linked binary to be easier to distribute?
Thanks
Andrea
EDIT:
Apparently something like https://nim-lang.org/docs/nimc.html#dynliboverride should do.
Specifically for this library, -p:useLibzipSrc also does.
Reading through the source it seems like you may be able to do this by passing -d:useLibzipSrc

GDB Debug information on scalar storage order

We have recently started using the GCC scalar_storage_order attribute for C structures which are shared between processors with different endianness.
The "problem" we are trying to solve is that it appears the debugger interprets the structure fields in the processor native scalar order (endianness).
Is there a way to include the endianness information for scalars in a structure in the debug information using GCC?
Does GDB support different endianness for specific structure definitions?
Please indicate if the question is not clear and thanks for any information on this.
You are probably hitting this gcc issue https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=82509, which was fixed in yet unreleased gcc 8.0.
As far as I understand you can try to apply the patch to your current gcc and also apply attached patch to gdb: https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2017-10/msg00266.html to solve the problem you are seeing.

Do DLLs built with Rust require libgcc.dll on run time?

If I build a DLL with Rust language, does it require libgcc*.dll to be present on run time?
On one hand:
I've seen a post somewhere on the Internet, claiming that yes it does;
rustc.exe has libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll in its directory, and cargo.exe won't run without the dll when downloaded from the http://crates.io website;
On the other hand:
I've seen articles about building toy OS kernels in Rust, so they most certainly don't require libgcc dynamic library to be present.
So, I'm confused. What's the definite answer?
Rust provides two main toolchains for Windows: x86_64-pc-windows-gnu and x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.
The -gnu toolchain includes an msys environment and uses GCC's ld.exe to link object files. This toolchain requires libgcc*.dll to be present at runtime. The main advantage of this toolchain is that it allows you to link against other msys provided libraries which can make it easier to link with certain C\C++ libraries that are difficult to under the normal Windows environment.
The -msvc toolchain uses the standard, native Windows development tools (either a Windows SDK install or a Visual Studio install). This toolchain does not use libgcc*.dll at either compile or runtime. Since this toolchain uses the normal windows linker, you are free to link against any normal Windows native libraries.
If you need to target 32-bit Windows, i686- variants of both of these toolchains are available.
NOTE: below answer summarizes situation as of Sep'2014; I'm not aware if it's still current, or if things have changed to better or worse since then. But I strongly suspect things have changed, given that 2 years have already passed since then. It would be cool if somebody tried to ask steveklabnik about it again, then update below info, or write a new, fresher answer!
Quick & raw transcript of a Rust IRC chat with steveklabnik, who gave me a kind of answer:
Hi; I have a question: if I build a DLL with Rust, does it require libgcc*.dll to be present on run time? (on Windows)
I believe that if you use the standard library, then it does require it;
IIRC we depend on one symbol from it;
but I am unsure.
How can I avoid using the standard library, or those parts of it that do? (and/or do you know which symbol exactly?)
It involves #[no_std] at your crate root; I think the unsafe guide has more.
Running nm -D | grep gcc shows me __gc_personality_v0, and then there is this: What is __gxx_personality_v0 for?,
so it looks like our stack unwinding implementation depends on that.
I seem to recall I've seen some RFCs to the effect of splitting standard library, too; are there parts I can use without pulling libgcc in?
Yes, libcore doesn't require any of that.
You give up libstd.
Also, quoting parts of the unsafe guide:
The core library (libcore) has very few dependencies and is much more portable than the standard library (libstd) itself. Additionally, the core library has most of the necessary functionality for writing idiomatic and effective Rust code. (...)
Further libraries, such as liballoc, add functionality to libcore which make other platform-specific assumptions, but continue to be more portable than the standard library itself.
And fragment of the current docs for unwind module:
Currently Rust uses unwind runtime provided by libgcc.
(The transcript was edited slightly for readability. Still, I'll happily delete this answer if anyone provides something better formatted and more thorough!)

Suggestions on how to write a debug format conversion tool

I'm looking to write a tool that aims to convert debug symbols of one format to another format that's compatible for use under GDB. This seems like a tedious and potentially complex project so I'm not exactly sure how to tackling it.
Intially I'm aiming to convert the Turbo Debug Symbol table(TDS) emitted from borland compilers into something like stabs or dwarf format(seems like dwarf is prefer from my research). But ideally I want to design my tool to be easy enough to extend so it could convert other formats too later on. e.g. codeview4 or maybe even pdb.
My primary motivation for creating this are:
Interoperability. If I can convert a foreign debug format into a form gdb can work with then source-level debugging would be possible on binaries compiled from another compiler other than gcc. This means any frontend debugging interface that uses gdb as a backend will work as well.
No other tools exist. I did a google searching around for similar tools and the closest I've found is tds2dbg. But it doesn't quite do what I'm looking for.
What I have to work with at the moment:
I already have a debug hook API that can understand the TDS debug format. I can use that to help me get at the needed information from the source format I'm converting from.
For the scope of this project, I'm mainly interested in getting this to work under the win32 environment. Other platforms and tools I'm not really concerned about.
The target dwarf debug format I'm converting to. This one I'm really not familiar with at all. I have used gcc ported compilers like MinGW before and debugged them with gdb with the dwarf format. But I don't have any idea how this format is implemented on windows.
The last point is the one I'm concerned about. I'm reading through the dwarf spec documentation but I find I'm having trouble really understanding and comprehending how it works. There's so much detail in there but at the same time it doesn't have any details about how dwarf gets implemented on object files and image files on a platform that doesn't use ELF natively -- namely the PE-COFF format that windows uses. The documentation is also a very dry read, long sentences make it hard to understand and diagrams and illustrations are sparse. I came across an API called libDwarf that should take most of the parsing work out of interpreting dwarf. The problem is I'm still trying to get it to build and I don't know yet how it will work out.
I haven't written any code yet since I don't fully understand what it is I need to build. I have a feeling the biggest hurtle will be figuring out how to work with dwarf due to it's complexity. Googling for information on how dwarf works under windows hasn't turned up anything helpful either. Like for example, there's no information about the 'glue' code that's needed to contain dwarf within a PE executable image file. How are the dwarf sections exactly layed out? Are there any header information for each section? GDB clearly doesn't just take a 'raw' dwarf debug file and use it as is. So what kind of format does gdb expect the debug file to be in for it to be able to work with it?
My question is, how can I start on such a project? More importantly, where can I turn to for help when I inevitably get stuck on a problem?
Affinic Assembler for Windows
Affinic Assembler is an x86/x86-64 assembler for Windows that takes GAS-syntax assembly source with DWARF debug information and generates corresponding CodeView format sections in object file in order to make the linked program debuggable in Visual Studio. This program is good for Cygwin and MinGW users to port Linux code to Windows.
http://www.affinic.com/?page_id=48
You are asking several questions here :-)
I think you are heading in the right direction, using libdwarf.
BUT, have you taken a look at objcopy to see if this tool can do some of the work for you? It probably doesn't support borland, pdb or codeview4, but it might be worth looking into. (Another approach may be to extend objcopy to support the formats you are trying to convert between.)
I have used the dwarf-discuss mailing list sometimes when I have become stuck.
http://lists.dwarfstd.org/listinfo.cgi/dwarf-discuss-dwarfstd.org
As for the questions on dwarf, split them into separate questions and I will do my best to
answer them. :-)

Nintendo DS homebrew with Ada?

Note: I know very little about the GCC toolchain, so this question may not make much sense.
Since GCC includes an Ada front end, and it can emit ARM, and devKitPro is based on GCC, is it possible to use Ada instead of C/C++ for writing code on the DS?
Edit: It seems that the target that devKitARM uses is arm-eabi.
devkitPro is not a toolchain, compiler or indeed any software package. The toolchain used to target the DS is devkitARM, one of the toolchains provided by devkitPro.
It may be possible to build the ada compiler but I doubt very much if you'll ever manage to get anything useful running on the DS itself. devkitPro will certainly never provide an ada compiler as part of the packages we produce.
Yes it is possible, see my project https://github.com/Lucretia/tamp and build the cross compiler as per my script. You would then be able to target NDS using Ada. I have build a basic RTS as well which will provide you with local exception handling.
And #Martin Beckett, why do think Ada is aimed squarely at DoD stuff? They dropped the mandate years ago and Ada is easily usable for any project, you do realise that Ada is a general purpose programming language don't you?
(Disclaimer: I don't know Ada)
Possibly.
You might be able to build devKitPro to use Ada, however, the pre-provided binaries (at least for OS X) do not have Ada support compiled in.
However, you will probably find yourself writing tons of C "glue" code to interface with the various hardware registers and the like.
One thing to consider when porting a language to the nintendo DS is the relatively small stack it has (16KB). There are possible workarounds such as swapping the SRAM stack content into DRAM (4MB) when stack gets full or just have the whole stack in DRAM (assumed to be auwfully slow).
And I second Dre on the fact that you'll have to provide yourself glue between the Ada library function you'd like to use and existing libraries on the DS (which are hopefully covering most of the hardware stuff).
On a practical plane, it is not possible.
On a theoretical plane, you could use one custom Ada parser (I found this one on the ANTLR site, but it is quite old) in order to translate Ada to C/C++, and then feed that to devkitpro.
However, the effort of building such translator is probably going to be equal (if not higher) to creating the game itself.

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