I have always wanted to understand x86 instruction encoding in detail but never gotten around to it. Of course not, who has time nowadays?! So, in order to force me to do it, I decided to write an x86 instruction decoder.
This talk attempts to show what I have learned in the process and how instruction encoding is done on x86.
As a practical aspect, the decoder I’ve scratched together tries to verbosely show some of the crazy low-level hacks^Wtechniques we do in the Linux kernel like alternatives patching, jump labels, exception tables, etc – they have a lot to do with deep knowledge of x86 instructions and how code is generally laid out in the binary kernel image. Maybe this talk can help shed some light on the whole lowlevel fun that’s happening under the hood in the kernel and so many are missing out on. And maybe it’ll make it more interesting and palatable to people and they wont scare so fast anymore when we go deep into the bowels of the kernel and the machine.
Borislav Petkov, SUSE
