Re: [gentoo-user] Looking for x86 or AMD64 disassembler

[David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com>]

On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:29:50 -0700
Brandon Vargo wrote:

> On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 19:33 -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > I'm looking for a disassembler so that I can see the underlying
> > assembly code in a variety of files, for example elf executables,
> > DOS executables, binary files (such as the master boot record
> > (MBR)), etc.
> [snip]
> > What do you all recommend for disassemblers?   Are there any good
> > ones for Gentoo?
> 
> I've used objdump (part of binutils) in the past for looking at ELF
> files; look at the -d option for disassembly. A quick test shows that
> it seems to work for exe files too, but I've never used it that way
> as I don't use Windows much, so I don't know for sure.
> 
> For the MBR, I don't know of any disassemblers per-se, but hex editors
> work well depending on what you are doing. hexdump (part of
> sys-apps/util-linux) works well. You might want to make an image of
> the MBR first with dd, depending on which tool you use, as some do not
> support reading from the disk directly.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Brandon Vargo
> 

Hi Brandon,

Indeed, hexdump mbr would show me the bytes but I want to see the code
as instructions.

objdump works fine for ELF.  Being greedy, the ideal tool would handle
all 3 formats.

The immediate need is pure binary (like the MBR).  A couple of weeks
ago I had to resort to an old DOS disassembler for a DOS executable.

I'd be much happier with a straight Linux solution.

Regards,

David