dwarf-synthesis/README.md

# dwarf-synthesis

A tool for automatic synthesis of DWARF.

The purpose of this tool is to take any given binary program or library,
examine its assembly code and, based solely on that, generate the corresponding
`.eh_frame` DWARF data.

## Dependencies

This tool relies on [BAP](https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap), which
is available through OPAM.

## Compiling

Simply run `make` to compile all the necessary tools, including compiling and
installing the BAP plugin `dwarfsynth`.

## Running with a wrapper script

To generate an `.eh_frame` section for some binary `foo.bin` and write the
output as `foo.eh.bin`, you can run

```
./synthesize_dwarf foo.bin foo.eh.bin
```

You can also omit the second parameter to simply overwrite `foo.bin`.

## Running by hand

If you want, for some reason, to run by hand the multiple components, you can
follow this procedure (by using more appropriate file names, and, possibly, a
temporary directory -- see `mktemp -d`).

### Running the BAP plugin

`bap prog_to_analyze.bin -p dwarfsynth --dwarfsynth-output tmp.marshal`

### Running `ml_dwarf_write`

You can get a help text with `./ml_dwarf_write.bin`. Otherwise, you can run

```
./ml_dwarf_write.bin tmp.marshal prog_to_analyze.bin eh_frame_section`
```

### Stitching the section into a binary

```
objcopy --add-section .eh_frame=eh_frame_section prog_to_analyze.bin prog_to_analyze.eh.bin
```

## Commonly used commands

### List a binary sections

`objdump -h blah.bin`

### Strip a binary of its `eh_frame`

`objcopy --remove-section '.eh_frame' --remove-section '.eh_frame_hdr' blah.bin`