OSDev.org

Hey, I'd like to announce a new project of mine called Chimera. It's an IA64 (no x86 compatibility, yet) instruction set disassembler written in C. The project is located at the URL in my signature. It will soon be ready for a beta test, although I suspect not many people will be wanting to test out an IA64 disassembler...

Currently it supports a very large chunk of the Itanium2 instruction set. Certain switches have been placed in the program to allow for customized text output to allow more debugging capabilities or raw instruction output for piping/re-use. I'd also like to thank JackScott for providing the awesome IA64 cross-compiler/binutils .deb packages!

The project page also contains the full source code and changesets if anyone is interested. If you would like to contribute any bug reports, patches, or feature requests please register at QuokForge to submit an "issue" or you can find me on IRC at #elitecafe on FreeNode.

Why did you call it Chimera? (What relation does it have to the mythology, if any?) Although I find the idea of VLIW to be superior in many aspects due to the advancement of compilers in recent years, I don't know how useful it would be in the real world. Neverthelss, it seems like a neat project, I I wish you the best of luck.

I actually named it Chimera because I had recently watched FullMetal Alchemist again and decided that a project built after many other failed projects needed a suiting name. It was supposed to be a temporary name until I could think of something ultimately more witty, but I forgot to do that and there it stays.

I forgot to mention a rather large piece of the puzzle that is Chimera. I'm designing this disassembler to act as the base to a binary emulator which will then hopefully act as the base to an IA64 CPU/system emulator. It's something to keep me occupied while I'm not developing an OS actively.

I think an IA64 would be a pretty neat emulator.. VLIW is a very interesting concept to me, but it's hard to just get into IA64 because of the extremely expensive hardware(nothing but servers use it just about!)