Many of the disassemblers in the disas folder are based on old
versions from the GNU tools (libopcode, GDB, ...) that were still
licensed under the GPL v2. The GNU tools switched to GPL v3 at one
point in time, so QEMU is stuck with the old versions, i.e. these
files did not see much updates for new processors anymore. But
for most architectures, we're preferring the Capstone disassembler
now anyway, so the old libopcode disassemblers are also hardly
used anymore.
I'm not 100% sure (thus this is marked as RFC), but I think we could
simply drop the old disassemblers nowadays, and hardly anybody would
miss them, since we now always embed capstone as a submodule anyway.
Or is there still an advantage in keeping these old files around?
This RFC series tackles with s390, arm (32-bit) and i386 ... I wanted
to get some feedback first, but if we agree that these can be removed,
the sparc, mips and ppc disassemblers likely can be removed, too.
(I think we should keep m68k.c since Capstone does not have support
for Coldfire CPUs yet).
Thomas Huth (3):
disas: Remove old libopcode s390 disassembler
disas: Remove old libopcode arm disassembler
disas: Remove old libopcode i386 disassembler