Re: [DynInst_API:] ParseAPI and PE files

[Bill Williams <bill@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/16/2014 06:13 AM, E.Robbins wrote:
> Hi,
> we are trying to use the ParseAPI with PE files. Even with the simple example in the ParseAPI manual, we get an error:
>
> [SymtabCodeSource.C] FATAL: can't create Symtab object for file <executable name>
>
> It appears that the SymtabCodeSource does not like PE files. Is this a known issue, and/or is there a work around?
Ed--

Not only is this not a known issue, but it's known to work--the 
SymtabCodeSource is used internally by Dyninst for all of its parsing, 
and Windows isn't *that* broken. (At least not if you're working from 
any remotely stable point, it's not.)
I've been seeing issues with path names with some frequency, though; 
Symtab will open paths of the standard drive-letter form. Both the 
\\device\whatever and the cygwin forms do not get converted 
automatically, and that can prevent Symtab from opening a file.
If <executable name> is in drive-letter form, absolute path, exists, 
permissions are good, etc, then this merits further investigation. Are 
you working on 8.1.2, master, the 8.2 branch...?
Oh. One other thing--if you're trying to analyze PE files on Linux, 
that's not presently going to work. It might be possible, if you have a 
Linux system with the necessary Windows headers present and you know of 
a replacement for the debug SDK, to coerce a Linux build of Symtab to 
speak PE. You could probably pull the text section out via objdump or 
similar and stuff it into a fake ELF file. I think I also have an 
memory-backed CodeSource implementation floating around somewhere that 
you could use as a starting point--as long as you can find the text 
section and either don't care about symbols or can find them without 
Windows headers, mocking up a CodeSource that speaks PE on Linux is a 
simple matter of engineering. It's engineering we haven't done because 
parsing PE on Linux is not of much use to Dyninst without a *very* 
full-featured cross-format Symtab backing it, such that we could rewrite 
PE files on Linux.
> Thanks,
> Ed
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--
--bw

Bill Williams
Paradyn Project
bill@xxxxxxxxxxx