[Beowulf] Detecting binaries that are limited to an architecture?

[Olli-Pekka Lehto]

Can't help but I'll give you a :+1: 

I was planning to do something like this some time ago but hit this same 
snag and just left it on the back burner and kind of forgot it there. :)

I really hope that you are able to implement this. It would also be useful
in tracking the amount of suboptimally compiled binaries (which would
lack any modern vector instructions). 

Best regards,
O-P

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul McIntosh" <paul.mcintosh at monash.edu>
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Sent: Thursday, 5 May, 2016 23:51:46
> Subject: [Beowulf] Detecting binaries that are limited to an architecture?

> All,
> 
> I am wondering if there is an easy way to detect if a binary makes use of
> opcodes which are not available on a specific architecture?
> 
> We have /usr/local mounted across nodes with some Intel Xeon X5650
> (Westmere) and some E5-2670 (SandyBridge). Some code spits out "Illegal
> Instruction" when run on the old nodes and it appears to be due to hitting
> shared libraries compiled on the newer nodes. We are going to have a similar
> situation on the newer clusters also.
> 
> I have been putting together a test suite for our software stack and would
> like to add the ability to sanity check binaries for such errors. I thought
> there would be easy way to do this by looking at the opcodes (objdump) and
> comparing them to what the architecture provides. However this requires
> knowing all the opcodes from Intel manuals for a chip.
> 
> I have be playing with opcode.sh
> (https://gist.github.com/rindeal/72af275f05d44e10ebca) which looks promising
> but will need a bit of manual work to get it to do what I want (and still
> may be incomplete/inaccurate).
> 
> Has anyone done this? Know of a way to easily get a computer readable list
> of opcodes per cpu (note /proc/cpuinfo flags just shows features not
> opecodes)?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paul
> --
> Dr Paul McIntosh
>  Senior HPC Consultant, Technical Lead,
>    Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment
> (www.massive.org.au)
>       Monash University, Ph: 9902 0439 Mob: 0434 524935
> 
> 
> 
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