Disassembler Benchmark

This repository holds benchmarking code for various x86/x86-64 disassembler libraries.

Results

Ubuntu 20.04 (WSL2), GCC 8.4.0, Rust 1.50.0, i5-6600K.

Test file: xul.dll from Firefox 86.0.1.7739.

decode only

BeaEngine (C), Capstone (C) don't support decode only.

decode + format

format only

BeaEngine (C), Capstone (C) don't support format only.

This is time(format) = time(decode+format) - time(decode) converted to MB/s.

Candidates

Capstone

DiStorm

XED

Zydis

iced

bddisasm

yaxpeax-x86

udis86

BeaEngine

Benchmarking

Windows:

REM Start "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019"
REM Start git bash:
"C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe"

Windows/Linux/macOS:

git clone --recursive 'https://github.com/icedland/disas-bench.git'
cd disas-bench.git
./make-all.sh
# Windows: python
python3 -mvenv venv
# Windows: source venv/Scripts/activate
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Optional args: <code-offset> <code-len> <filename> [loop-count]
python bench.py

The optional bench.py arguments are:

• <code-offset> = offset of the code section (in decimal or 0x hex)
• <code-len> = length of the code section (in decimal or 0x hex)
• <filename> = 64-bit x86 binary file to decode and format
• [loop-count] = optional loop count. Total number of bytes decoded and formatted is <code-len> * [loop-count]

You can use dumpbin.exe (Windows) or objdump to get the offset and size of the code section.

dumpbin (start "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019")

Find .text section and use <code-len> = virtual size (4CFA6B6 below) and <code-offset> = file pointer to raw data (400 below). All values are in hex so add a 0x prefix when passing the values to bench.py.

C:\path> dumpbin -headers filename.dll

...
SECTION HEADER #1
   .text name
 4CFA6B6 virtual size
    1000 virtual address (0000000180001000 to 0000000184CFB6B5)
 4CFA800 size of raw data
     400 file pointer to raw data (00000400 to 04CFABFF)
...

objdump

Find .text section and set <code-len> to the first 32-bit value (04cfa6b6 below) and <code-offset> to the last 32-bit value (00000400 below). All values are in hex so add a 0x prefix when passing the values to bench.py.

$ objdump -h filename

...
Sections:
Idx Name          Size      VMA               LMA               File off  Algn
  0 .text         04cfa6b6  0000000180001000  0000000180001000  00000400  2**4
                  CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE
...

Contributing

If you feel like the benchmark for a lib doesn't drive it to its full potential or treats it unfairly, I'd be happy to accept PRs with improvements!