libxdisasm is a simple and small library that allows disassembly of raw bytes. It currently supports x86, x86_64, arm, ppc and mips. It is meant to provide a quick way to disassemble a raw chunk of bytes. An example of a tool that uses libxdisasm is xdisasm.

If you are on a 64-bit Linux machine and don't feel like building binutils from source, I have included the static libraries needed for the tool to compile. You can build the tool with:

make withstatic

First Build binutils with the appropriate flags. You can get the source from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/. By default binutils will install the shared libraries in /usr/local/lib. If this is not in your library path you might run into some issues. Run the following commands in the directory where you extracted the binutils archive.

./configure --enable-targets=all --enable-shared
make
sudo make install

Then you can build xdisasm. From the top level directory, run the following command:

make

As stated above, the library is pretty small and it basically is defined by these two pairs of functions:

insn_list * disassemble(unsigned int vma, char * rawbuf, size_t buflen, int arch, int bits, int endian)
void free_all_instrs(insn_list **ilist)

insn_t * disassemble_one((unsigned int vma, char * rawbuf, size_t buflen, int arch, int bits, int endian)
void free_instr(insn_t *isntr)

This function returns a linked list of insn_t types which are basically containeres for decoded instructions. The arguments to the disassemble*() functions are described below:

• vma - This is the address where the raw buffer will be assumed to be loaded in memory
• rawbuf - This buffer points to the raw bytes that are supposed to be disassembled
• buflen - This is the length of the data being disassembled
• arch - One of ARCH__{arm ,x86, powerpc, mips}
• bits - 64-bit, 32-bit or 16-bit
• endian - 1 for big endian, 0 for little endian

The free_all_instrs() function frees the memory allocated for the insn_list list and the free_instr() frees the memory allocated for one instruction.