On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 02:47:54PM +0100, Terje Sletteb? wrote:
[snip]
> As you say, and as was pointed out at the start of the thread, it may work
> on a specific platform (like x86). Perhaps it could be possible to have code
> that detects the platform, and which could then report an error on
> misalignment, if that is not tolerated on the given platform. It appears
> Boost.Config isn't enough for this, though, as it only detects the OS, not
> the underlying hardware.
>
> How did you do it on the ARM? As I understand, it requires word-alignment
> for words (and half-word alignment for half-words, if that is supported on
> the given ARM version).
>
Well it is probably a conjuntion of luck and the kind of data we were working
with. As I have mentioned before, offset_cast was used mostly for network
packet analysis. And fortunately almost all network protocol structures
have correct aligmnent. So we were casting only to correct offsets :)
> > I have mentioned before, that binary analysis could be done also using a
> > more
> > complicated framework. Would it make sense to create one?
> >
> What does it do?
The framework I'm proposing should allow user to specify a structure layout
( like what field starts where and what type if have ). Then there would
be a kind of possibly hidden management which would do nescesary copy-in and
copy-out operations.
I can imagine it should be something like this:
void modify_binary_header( void* pData )
{
binary_struct b;
b.add_field<int>( 0, "field1" );
b.add_field<char>( 4, "field2" );
b.add_field<int>( 5, "field3" );
b.map_to_binary( pData, offset );
b["field1"]=b["field2"]*2;
}
Please consider this as very preliminary example, just to show a desired functionality.
Construction of tructure can be probably done in some better way using static
templates.
Idea is that binary_struct would be responsible to some sort of safe copying (
possibly byte-by-byte )
of binary data into/out from the internal field representation. It can provide also
some
other functionality like byte order corretion or handling of sub-byte fields (
something what
is not aligned to byte boundary )
Well, this is my idea how to resolve such a problem where simple mapping using
offset_cast
is not sufficient.
Regards,
Pavol
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
