I’m a big fan of IDA Pro, especially of the way that users can extend the functionality of it via plugins. So anyway, I’m working on a PowerPC target and find that IDA Pro doesn’t handle Altivec/VMX instructions.. which is a bit of a pain, given that the target I’m working on does. Yes, maybe it’s a bit odd to not support it, given that most PPC implementations come with Altivec/VMX nowadays, but maybe it’s also a bit unreasonable to expect Data Rescue to support absolutely every processor out there.

And this is where the ability of IDA Pro to support user-written plugins comes in. I’ve knocked up a processor extension module (ppcAltivec) that extends the supplied PowerPC processor module so that Altivec/VMX instructions are supported.

Version 1.3 (26th September 2005)

1. Minor changes to support IDA Pro 4.9.

Version 1.2 (22nd May 2005)

1. Now supports automatic comments (Options|General|Auto Comments) for all Altivec/VMX instructions.

Version 1.1 (19th May 2005)

1. All the usage complexity that was in Version 1.0 of this plugin is now resolved.
2. Corrections to register number extraction.
3. The operand order for ‘vmaddfp’ was incorrect, and has now been fixed.
4. Added support for Altivec instructions that take 4 parameters.

ppcAltivec_source_1_3.zip Compiles with Visual Studio .NET 2003. ppcAltivec_binaries_1_3.zip Compiled to work with IDA Pro 4.9 (32 and 64 bit versions).

Installation is a doddle. Just place the two processor extension modules (ppcAltivec.plw and ppcAltivec.p64) within your IDA Pro ‘plugins’ directory.