[RFC PATCH] ARM: Add generic instruction opcode manipulation helpers

[Will Deacon]

Hi Dave,

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 11:28:13AM +0000, Dave Martin wrote:
> This patch adds some endianness-agnostic helpers to convert machine
> instructions between canonical integer form and in-memory
> representation, and also provides a transparent way to read a
> single Thumb instruction from memory, without the need to know the
> size in advance or write explicit condition checks.
> 
> A canonical integer form for representing instructions is also
> formalised here.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <dave.martin at linaro.org>
> ---
>  arch/arm/include/asm/opcodes.h |  162 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 arch/arm/include/asm/opcodes.h

It looks like I might need to implement a basic disassembler for the
hw_breakpoint code and I would certainly like to reuse as much code as I
can. This header could obviously provide the code to fetch and format the
instruction, but it would be nice to have some extra helpers to aid
decoding.

Tixy - how much work do you reckon it would be to rework your kprobes
decoding code into a generic `here are my callbacks, please decode this
instruction stream for me' type thing?

All I want for hw_breakpoint is to know whether an instruction is a load or
a store, but even for that it looks like I'll need to duplicate a lot of
stuff.

Will