Re: RFC: Why dont we move to newer capstone?

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2019 at 02:33:34PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 at 11:21, Lucien Murray-Pitts
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Whilst working on a m68k patch I noticed that the capstone in use
> > today (3.0) doesnt support the M68K and thus a hand turned disasm
> > function is used.
> >
> > The newer capstone (5.0) appears to support a few more CPU, inc. m68k.
> >
> > Why we move to this newer capstone?
> 
> Moving to a newer capstone sounds like a good idea. The only
> reason we haven't moved forward as far as I'm aware is that
> nobody has done the work to send a patch to do that move
> forward to the newer version. Richard Henderson would
> probably know if there was any other blocker.

Bearing in mind our distro support policy, we need to continue to
support 3.0 series of capstone for a while yet based on what I
see in various distros. eg Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has 3.0.4, as does
Fedora 29.  Version 4.0 is only in a few very new distros:

   https://repology.org/project/capstone/versions

We can of course use features from newer capstone, *provided* we correctly
do conditional compilation so that we can still build against 3.0 series
on distros that have that version.

Regards,
Daniel
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