[TUHS] Unix Reverse Engineering

Angelo Papenhoff aap at papnet.eu
Tue May 13 09:58:56 AEST 2025


Check v10's cmd/PDP11/11as source

Cheers, aap

On 12/05/25, Thalia Archibald via TUHS wrote:
> On May 12, 2025, at 04:04, Noel wrote:
> > That's going to be a real trick; 'as' was written in PDP-11 assembler:
> 
> It has, indeed, been quite the challenge to translate. I’ve completed 1114/3531
> lines or 7/20 files in my translation of `as` to C. It seems that it was never
> ported to C by the original authors, so this is probably the most closely
> someone’s looked at many parts of it in a long time.
> 
> I’ve very steadily been improving my PDP-11 assembly skills and rather efficient
> now. It’s quite tedious tracking all the register effects, though good
> signatures annotated with in- and out-registers helps a lot. I feel like a
> compiler, manually performing control flow structuring like the Relooper or LLVM
> Stackifier algorithms. With this completed, my manual effort will bootstrap
> reverse engineering the rest with a proper decompiler.
> 
> Thalia


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