e166cd93bb
* arm64 python: Avoid nested class in insn hook for 10x hook speedup Promote CpReg to a module-level class to address unnecessary performance reduction. In a real-world use case tracing the emulation of real-world machine code, this change reduces time spent in CpReg namedtuple construction from 10% of overall time to below 1%, for a 10x speedup of the insn hook itself, or a 10% overall speedup. Measured using cProfile, python 3.13. * upgrade distro to 22.04 * revert to 22.04 for now * also revert for wheels --------- Co-authored-by: mio <mio@lazym.io>
Unicorn
Unicorn is a lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture CPU emulator framework based on QEMU.
Unicorn offers some unparalleled features:
- Multi-architecture: ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, RISCV, SPARC, S390X, TriCore and X86 (16, 32, 64-bit)
- Clean/simple/lightweight/intuitive architecture-neutral API
- Implemented in pure C language, with bindings for Crystal, Clojure, Visual Basic, Perl, Rust, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, Go, Delphi/Free Pascal, Haskell, Pharo, and Lua.
- Native support for Windows & *nix (with Mac OSX, Linux, *BSD & Solaris confirmed)
- High performance via Just-In-Time compilation
- Support for fine-grained instrumentation at various levels
- Thread-safety by design
- Distributed under free software license GPLv2
Further information is available at http://www.unicorn-engine.org
Python Bindings for Unicorn
Originally written by Nguyen Anh Quynh, polished and redesigned by elicn, maintained by all community contributors.
Install
Install a prebuilt wheel from PyPI:
python3 -m pip install unicorn
In case you would like to develop the bindings:
DEBUG=1 THREADS=4 python3 -m pip install --user -e .
# Workaround for Pylance
DEBUG=1 THREADS=4 python3 -m pip install --user -e . --config-settings editable_mode=strict
or install it by building it by yourself:
THREADS=4 python3 -m pip install --user .
Explanations for arguments:
THREADS=4will use 4 threads for building.DEBUG=1will build debug version of unicorn.--userwill install the bindings to your user directory instead of requiring root permission.-einfers the editable mode, which gives your instant feedback instead of re-compiling every time.
Note that you should setup a valid building environment according to docs/COMPILE.md but not necessarily build it because setup.py will do this for you.
Python2 compatibility
By default, Unicorn python bindings works with Python3.7 and above, as it offers more powerful features which improves developing efficiency compared to Python2. However, Unicorn will only keep compatible with all features Unicorn1 offers regarding Python2 because it has reached end-of-life for more than 3 years at the time of writing this README. While offering all features for both Python2 & Python3 is desirable and doable, it inevitably costs too much efforts to maintain and few users really rely on this. Therefore, we assume that if users still stick to Python2, previous Unicorn1 features should be enough. If you really want some new features Unicorn2 offers, please check and pull request to unicorn/unicorn_py2. We are happy to review and accept!
Even though the build of wheel packages requires Python3, it's still possible to re-tag the wheel produced from Python3 with py2 tag and then run python2 -m pip install <retagged-wheel-py>. For detailed commands please refer to our workflow files.