An open-source binary utility generator

Abstract

Electronic system level (ESL) modeling allows early hardware-dependent software (HDS) development. Due to broad CPU diversity and shrinking time-to-market, HDS development can neither rely on hand-retargeting binary tools, nor can it rely on pre-existent tools within standard packages. As a consequence, binary utilities which can be easily adapted to new CPU targets are of increasing interest. We present in this article a framework for automatic generation of binary utilities. It relies on two innovative ideas: platform-aware modeling and more inclusive relocation handling. Generated assemblers, linkers, disassemblers and debuggers were validated for MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, i8051 and PIC16F84. An open-source prototype generator is available for download.

Software Development Tool Generation Method Suitable for Instruction Set Extension of Embedded Processors

“…7) for the SPARC architecture. In those years, the development of the ArchC started, which is an open-source binary utility generator 10) . Baldassin reported in Ref.…”

ACCGen: An Automatic ArchC Compiler Generator

“…The compiler should also be aware of the new instruction in order to generate it when compiling code. Baldassin et al [4] extended the ArchC abstract model with annotations to enable automatic generation of assemblers, linkers, disassemblers and debuggers. Their tool (acbinutils), later integrated into the ArchC project, enabled the designers to automatically generate most of the tools present on the compilation and debugging toolchains.…”

“…Since the ArchC ADL ArchC already has automatic assembler generation [4], we chose to rely on this generated assembler and generate a back end functional up to assembly emission. Therefore, our ACCGen tool requires only the assembly syntax information, already present on the ArchC ADL.…”

“…We used the ArchC simulation and binary tools generation infrastructure [2], [4] to verify the generated ARM back end. There is no easy way to check if a whole compiler toolchain is completely correct, so we built a test infrastructure using Mibench [14] programs and observed their output.…”

“…ArchC has also a rich set of description features that allow the platform designer to embed assembly language syntax annotations into the ADL processor model and automatically generate assemblers, linkers and debuggers [4], [5] based on the GNU binutils framework [6].…”