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    Saturday, 30 March 2013

    Scanning for assembly code in Free Software 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:

    1. if there was actually any assembly there;
    2. if so, what it was for, and
    3. whether it was actually used

    I've written a full report about what I found in the scan, and I'll be writing some more articles based on it shortly.

    03:08 :: # :: /linaro :: 2 comments