2.1

March 5, 2014

Release 2.1 brings a lot of important changes: see here on how to modify 2.0-based code to work with 2.1 API.


API changes:

  • API version has been bumped to 2.1.

  • Change prototype of cs_close() to be able to invalidate closed handle. See http://capstone-engine.org/version_2.1_API.html for more information.

  • Extend cs_support() to handle more query types, not only about supported architectures. This change is backward compatible, however, so existent code do not need to be modified to support this.

  • New query type CS_SUPPORT_DIET for cs_support() to ask about diet status of the engine.

  • New error code CS_ERR_DIET to report errors about newly added diet mode.

  • New error code CS_ERR_VERSION to report issue of incompatible versions between bindings & core engine.


Core changes

  • On memory usage, Capstone uses about 40% less memory, while still faster than version 2.0.

  • All architectures are much smaller: binaries size reduce at least 30%. Especially, X86-only binary reduces from 1.9MB to just 720KB.

  • Support diet mode, in which engine size is further reduced (by around 40%) for embedding purpose. The price to pay is that we have to sacrifice some non-critical data fields. See http://capstone-engine.org/diet.html for more details.


Architectures

  • Update all 5 architectures to fix bugs.

  • PowerPC:

    • New instructions: FMR & MSYNC.

  • Mips:

    • New instruction: DLSA

  • X86:

    • Properly handle AVX-512 instructions.

    • New instructions: PSETPM, SALC, INT1, GETSEC.

    • Fix some memory leaking issues in case of prefixed instructions such as LOCK, REP, REPNE.


Python binding

  • Verify the core version at initialization time. Refuse to run if its version is different from the core’s version.

  • New API disasm_lite() added to Cs class. This light API only returns tuples of (address, size, mnemonic, op_str), rather than list of CsInsn objects. This improves performance by around 30% in some benchmarks.

  • New API version_bind() returns binding’s version, which might differ from the core’s API version if binding is out-of-date.

  • New API debug() returns information on Cython support, diet status, archs compiled in & versions of core & binding.

  • Fixed some memory leaking bugs for Cython binding.

  • Fix a bug crashing Cython code when accessing @regs_read/regs_write/groups.

  • Support diet mode.


Java binding

  • Fix some memory leaking bugs.

  • New API version() returns combined API version.

  • Support diet mode.

  • Better support for detail option.


Miscellaneous

  • make.sh now can uninstall the core engine. This is done with:
  $ sudo ./make.sh uninstall