The ABI for big-endian AArch32, as specified by AAELF32, is above-
averagely complicated. Relocatable object files are expected to store
instruction encodings in byte order matching the ELF file's endianness
(so, big-endian for a BE ELF file). But executable images can
either do that or store instructions little-endian regardless
of data and ELF endianness (to support BE32 and BE8 platforms
respectively). They signal the latter by setting the EF_ARM_BE8 flag
in the ELF header.
(In the case of the Thumb instruction set, this all means that each
16-bit halfword of a Thumb instruction is stored in one or other
endianness. The two halfwords of a 32-bit Thumb instruction must
appear in the same order no matter what, because the first halfword is
the one that must avoid overlapping the encoding of any 16-bit Thumb
instruction.)
llvm-objdump was unconditionally expecting Arm instructions to be
stored little-endian. So it would correctly disassemble a BE8 image,
but if you gave it a BE32 image or a BE object file, it would retrieve
every instruction in byte-swapped form and disassemble it to
nonsense. (Even an object file output by LLVM itself, because
ARMMCCodeEmitter outputs instructions big-endian in big-endian mode,
which is correct for writing an object file.)
This patch allows llvm-objdump to correctly disassemble all three of
those classes of Arm ELF file. It does it by introducing a new
SubtargetFeature for big-endian instructions, setting it from the ELF
image type and flags during llvm-objdump setup, and teaching both
ARMDisassembler and llvm-objdump itself to pay attention to it when
retrieving instruction data from a section being disassembled.
// Endianness of instruction encodings