The VIA ALTINST instruction #295
Labels
A-decoder
Area: Decoder
C-enhancement
Category: Enhancement of existing features
P-low
Priority: Low
The VIA C3 processor features an instruction referred to as
ALTINST
with an encoding of0F 3F
, that Zydis currently doesn't recognize. This instruction exists as an officially documented instruction in C3 ( http://datasheets.chipdb.org/VIA/Samuel2/VIA%20C3%20Samuel%202%20Datasheet%20V1.12.pdf , see second-to-last page ). This instruction switches the processor from regular x86 execution to an undocumented pseudo-RISC instruction set; this caused some ruckus a few years ago ( https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/rosenbridge ), as this instruction set allowed user-mode access to all sorts of system registers.This instruction is not known to exist in any later VIA processors, and as far as I can find, no other x86 processor has ever assigned any other hardware instruction to the
0F 3F
opcode. So I suppose the question becomes - is this processor considered modern enough for theALTINST
instruction to be within the scope of Zydis?(As for the pseudo-RISC ISA, I assume that one is going to be well out of scope for Zydis; it's not really x86 and it is not well-documented.)
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