Retargetable Binary Tools

Abstract

Binary tools are crucial to platform-based design, specially in early development of hardware-dependent software since it effectively enables hardware-software co-design. In this chapter we present the mechanisms available in ArchC that allows the automatic generation of binary tools such as assemblers, disassemblers, linkers, and debuggers. We start by describing the ArchC language extensions used to declare assembly language symbols, instruction syntax, instruction encoding, and operand modifiers. Following the language support, we show how our retargeting technique allows the automatic generation of the binary tools. We also discuss the GNU binutils framework and how it fits into our retargetability mechanism. We close the chapter by guiding the reader through the steps required to generate the tools from a processor model written in ArchC.