GNU poke @ GSOC 2020

GNU poke is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2020, under the GNU umbrella! Please take a look to the ideas/projects below and, if you are interested in doing any of them, contact us.

poke is a generic, extensible binary editor, that can be taught about the structure of abstract entities. This project is about developing a full-fledged pickle for the ELF format.

This pickle shall include:

• Support for both ELF32 and ELF64.
• Descriptions for all the ELF data structures: sections, relocations, symbols, etc
• Pretty printers.
• Utility functions.
• Integrity checks.
• Some linking support.

Note that there is already a minimal ELF pickle in the poke source tree, that can serve as the base for this project. See pickles/elf.pk.

Skills required: Poke programming, good knowledge of object formats, in particular ELF.
Contact address: poke-devel@gnu.org

poke is a generic, extensible binary editor, that can be taught about the structure of abstract entities. This project is about developing a full-fledged pickle for the DWARF format.

This pickle shall include:

• Support for DWARF2, DWARF3 and DWARF4.
• Descriptions for all the DWARF data structures: DIEs, ULEB128, etc.
• Pretty printers.
• Utility functions.
• Integrity checks.
• An interpreter for DWARF expressions.

Skills required: Poke programming, good knowledge of DWARF.
Contact address: poke-devel@gnu.org

Right now poke supports integer values of any number of bits, from 1 to 64. We wish to extend this to cover integers with an arbitrarily large number of bits.

This is a broad project requiring work on many areas of the program:

• Integration with the GNU gmp library.
• Changes in the Poke language.
• Compiler work.
• Poke Virtual Machine work:
• New boxed values for big numbers.
• New set of instructions operating on big numbers.
• Adapt the IO subsystem to handle integers bigger than 64 bits.
• Tests and documentation.

Skills required: C programming, compilers, interpreters, low level programming.
Contact address: poke-devel@gnu.org

GNU poke needs a machine interface so it can interact with other programs (GUIs, testers, etc) in an efficient way.

+---------+                  +---------+
|   GUI   | <----- MI -----> |   poke  |
+---------+                  +---------+

These are some initial thoughts about requirements:

• The MI protocol shall be based on JSON (because the kids of today...), and a good inspiration is the Debug Adapter Protocol
• The MI should be at least as powerful as the normal command-line interface. This means that everything that is doable in the command line shall be doable using the MI.
• The MI shall be suitable to transmit large amounts of data in an efficient way. Think for example on a GUI that wants to show a scrollable dump of some IO space.
• poke shall provide both efficient local transports (such as pipes) and network-capable ones (such as tcp sockets.) but the MI interface shall be independent on how it is transported.
• The MI shall provide services to execute arbitrary Poke code.
• The MI shall provide Poke values encoded in JSON. For example, a Poke array will most likely be encoded in the MI as a JSON array, but it may also include its printed representation (or the later may be provided by another service/request.)
• A testsuite shall be provided.
• The protocol shall be throughfully documented in the manual.

Skills required: C programming, compilers, interpreters, low level programming.
Contact address: poke-devel@gnu.org