Research And Application Of Processor Description Language

Processor description language is an abstract representation of the architecture and instruction set of processors, which provides an unified and abstract way of description,and conceals the difference of structure of various description entities. It has been widely used in the field of system development and reverse engineering, and plays an important role in the design and generation of tools, such as disassembler, simulator, emulator, code generation and so on. The thesis aims at the research and application of processor description language.The main processor description languages are researched in the thesis, among which nML is analyzed in detail. Aiming at the status that the general processor description languages have the features of the specificity of purpose in designing and the redundancy of information for the needs of generation of various tools, an attribute-extensible processor description language (X_nML) is proposed, which is based upon description pattern of nML and suits for the auto-generation of various tools by means of attribute-extensible. Following that the grammar description and the rules of attribute definition of X_nML are presented, the applicability of X_nML is illuminated via the extensible attribute definition of assembler/disassembler and simulator, and the descriptions of MIPS instruction set and ARM instruction set. Finally, X_nML is applied in the automatic generation tool of IDA processor model (IDP) plug-in, and the algorithms of generation and flattening of attribute abstract tree based on X_nML description are designed and implemented, thus provides an effective way of the IDP plug-in extending.The results show that the way of IDP plug-in automatic generation based on X_nML is correct and functional integrated. IDP plug-in can be generated quickly and effectively in this way,thus provides a referenced method for the generation of reverse tools and system development tools.