Retargetable binary utilities

Since software is playing an increasingly important role in system-on-chip, retargetable compilation has been an active research area in the last few years. However, the retargeting of equally important downstream system tools, such as assemblers, linkers and debuggers, has either been ignored, or falls short of meeting the requirements of modem programming languages and operating systems. In this paper, we present techniques that can automatically retarget the GNU binutils tool kit, which contains a large array of production-quality downstream tools. Other than having all the advantages enjoyed by open-source software by aligning to a de facto standard, our techniques are systematic, as a result of using a formal model of instruction set architecture (ISA) and application binary interface (ABI); and simple, as a result of leveraging free software to the largest extent.