McIntyre: Scanning for assembly code in Free Software packages On his blog, Steve McIntyre
writes about work he has been doing to identify assembly code in Linux packages:
In the Linaro Enterprise Group, my task for the last several weeks was to work through a huge number of packages looking for assembly code. Why? So that we could identify code that would need porting to work well on AArch64, the new 64-bit execution state coming to the ARM world Real Soon Now.
Working with some Ubuntu and Fedora developers, we generated a list of packages included in each distribution that seemed to contain assembly code of some sort. Then I worked through that list, checking to see:
- if there was actually any assembly there;
- if so, what it was for, and
- whether it was actually used
That work resulted in a report with his findings.