IDA 7.3: Qt 5.6.3 configure options & patch

A handful of our users have already requested information regarding the Qt 5.6.3 build, that is shipped with IDA 7.3. Configure options Here are the options that were used to build the libraries on: Windows: …\5.6.3\configure.bat “-nomake” “tests” “-qtnamespace” “QT” “-confirm-license” “-accessibility” “-opensource” “-force-debug-info” “-platform” “win32-msvc2015” “-opengl” “desktop” “-prefix” “C:/Qt/5.6.3-x64” Note that you will have to build with Visual […]

Extending IDA processor modules for GDB debugging

Introduction IDA has debugging support for multiple architectures, such as Intel x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, and, since IDA 7.4, Motorola 68k, Infineon TriCore, and Renesas RH850. Some of these architectures are natively supported, either locally through IDA (x86-only), or remotely through the use of debugger servers (x86 and ARM). The other architectures listed above are supported […]

Hack of the day #2: Command-Line Interface helpers

The problem The “command-line input” (CLI), situated at the bottom of IDA’s window, is a very powerful tool to quickly execute commands in the language that is currently selected. Typically, that language will be Python, and one can use helpers such as idc.here() to retrieve the address of the cursor location. However, when some debuggers such as […]

Microcode in pictures

Since a picture is worth thousand words below are a few drawings for your perusal. Let us start at the top level, with the mbl_array_t class, which represents the entire microcode object: The above picture does not show the control flow graph. For that we use predecessor and successor lists: Pay attention to the block types here, […]

IDA 6.95: Qt 5.6.0 configure options & patch

A handful of our users have already requested information regarding the Qt 5.6.0 build, that is shipped with IDA 6.95. Configure options Here are the options that were used to build the libraries on: Windows: …\5.6.0\configure.bat “-nomake” “tests” “-qtnamespace” “QT” “-confirm-license” “-accessibility” “-opensource” “-force-debug-info” “-platform” “win32-msvc2015” “-opengl” “desktop” “-prefix” “C:/Qt/5.6.0” Note that you will have […]

Installing IDA 6.95 on Linux

IDA is still, as of this writing (August 9th, 2015), a 32-bit application and both IDA & its installer(*) require certain 32-bit libraries to be present on your Linux system before they can run. Here is the list of commands you will have to run in order to install those dependencies, for the following systems: […]

IDA + Windows + system python 2.7.11

In case you: are running IDA on Windows are using the system’s Python (as opposed to the bundled Python distribution, that one can opt for at installation-time) have installed the recently released Python 2.7.11 …you will have noticed that IDAPython fails to load the ‘site’ module and, consequently, IDAPython is not available. As far as I […]

IDA 6.9, Mac OS X, 'random' crashes

Intended audience IDA 6.9 users on Mac OS X, who have suffered seemingly-apparent crashes while using IDA. The problem The Qt 5.4.1 libraries shipped with IDA 6.9 suffer from the following bug: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-44708, which was apparently fixed in Qt 5.5.0. If, when IDA crashes, you ever spotted a backtrace that looks like the following: frame #0: 0x00000000 frame #1: 0x00d8a50d […]

Beware: IDA C++ plugins, Qt 5.x, QStringLiteral: crash at exit-time

Intended audience IDA C++ plugin authors, who wish to link such plugins against Qt 5.x libraries. The problem One of our customers, Aliaksandr Trafimchuk, recently reported that whenever IDA was run with a plugin of his that links against the Qt libraries that we ship, IDA would crash at exit-time (at least on Windows.) Aliaksandr already did most of […]