Comparing disassembly listing, but only in parts where C source has changed

[robgee1964]

Hi Aaton

Thanks so much for your reply. Actually in the end I found a diff engine which runs under .net, so I've created a simple C# utility for this particular job.

I do appreciate the great support though, and thanks again.

[Aaron]

Hello,

The two main tools that BC4 can offer are the regex Grammar definitions (which run through the whole file, looking for matches) or pre-processing Conversion (which can run any command line app, taking an input, and presenting back a processed output; in this case, an output striped of all unimportant text).

Our reference material for general Unimportance is here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo..._unimportantv3
while Conversion is covered here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo...rnalconversion

We don't have a predefined format that can detect C Souce within another file type; if you are familiar with any command line app which could process this, then using the Conversion process is probably best to separate your data. We don't have an If This/Then logic for the grammars, so the regular expressions can't match on "if C Source Above, then match on assembly below"; the regEx would need to match on the specific text you are trying to find or not find, and then that match can be made Important or Unimportant.

[robgee1964]

I have two sets of disassembly listings, produced with objdump -S- so the original C source is interleaved with the asm output.

What I want to do is compare only those assembly lines for which the C source has changed, in other words if a change is detected in the C source then compare the following lines of disassembly. The object of the exercise is to find what effect patches (carried out to meet a coding standard) are having on the generated object code.

typical output of the disassembly listing is this

 	
  for (i = LCD_WIDTH * LCD_HEIGHT * 2 / 4; i < LCD_WIDTH * LCD_HEIGHT * 3 / 4; i++)
  fc:	697b      	ldr	r3, [r7, #20]
  fe:	3301      	adds	r3, #1
 100:	617b      	str	r3, [r7, #20]

Obviously regex's can be written to match the C source and disassembled lines, and as a start I created a regex which allows the C source lines to be marked as "unimportant text". The trouble is the logic I really want is shown in the pseudo code below

if((line.type ==  Csource) && (line.this != line.that)) {
   while(1) {
      line =  getNextLine();
      if(line.type == Disassembly {
         if(line.this != line.other) {
             writeToDiffLog(line);
         }
      }
      else if(line.type == Csource) {
         break;
      }
   }
}

I feel this could well be doable, but am quite at a loss as to how! Therefore if anyone knows how this might be acheived I would be most grateful.