unicorn/docs/COMPILE-WINDOWS.md

To build Unicorn on Windows natively using Visual Studio, see docs under "msvc" directory in root directory.

The rest of this manual shows how to cross-compile Unicorn for Windows using either MingW or Msys2.

To compile for Linux, Mac OS X and Unix-based OS, see COMPILE-NIX.md

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[0] Dependencies

For Windows, cross-compile requires Mingw. At the moment, it is confirmed that Unicorn can be compiled either on Ubuntu or Windows.

• On Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit, do:

  • Download DEB packages for Mingw64 from:

  https://launchpad.net/~greg-hellings/+archive/ubuntu/mingw-libs/+build/2924251

• On Windows, install MinGW via package MSYS2 at https://msys2.github.io/

  Follow the install instructions and don't forget to update the system packages with:

    $ pacman --needed -Sy bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime
  

  Then close MSYS2, run it again from Start menu and update the rest with:

    $ pacman -Su
  

  Finally, install required toolchain to build C projects.

  • To compile for Windows 32-bit, run:

      $ pacman -S make
      $ pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-toolchain
    

  • To compile for Windows 64-bit, run:

      $ pacman -S make
      $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
    

• For Cygwin, "make", "gcc-core", "libpcre-devel", "zlib-devel" are needed.

  If apt-cyg is available, you can install these with:

    $ apt-cyg install make gcc-core libpcre-devel zlib-devel
  

[1] Tailor Unicorn to your need.

Out of 6 archtitectures supported by Unicorn (Arm, Arm64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, & X86), if you just need several selected archs, choose which ones you want to compile in by editing "config.mk" before going to next steps.

By default, all 6 architectures are compiled.

The other way of customize Unicorn without having to edit config.mk is to pass the desired options on the commandline to ./make.sh. Currently, Unicorn supports 4 options, as follows.

• UNICORN_ARCHS: specify list of architectures to compiled in.
• UNICORN_STATIC: build static library.
• UNICORN_SHARED: build dynamic (shared) library.
• UNICORN_QEMU_FLAGS: specify extra flags for qemu's configure script

To avoid editing config.mk for these customization, we can pass their values to make.sh, as follows.

    $ UNICORN_ARCHS="arm aarch64 x86" ./make.sh

NOTE: on commandline, put these values in front of ./make.sh, not after it.

For each option, refer to docs/README for more details.

[2] Compile from source on Windows - with MinGW (MSYS2)

To compile with MinGW, install MSYS2 as instructed in the first section.

Note: After MSYS2 is installed, you will have 3 shortcuts to open the command prompt: "MSYS2 MSYS", "MSYS2 MinGW-32 bit" and "MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit". Use the MinGW shortcut so that compilation succeeds.

Then, build Unicorn with the next steps:

• To compile Windows 32-bit binary with MinGW, run:

    $ ./make.sh cross-win32
  

• To compile Windows 64-bit binary with MinGW, run:

    $ ./make.sh cross-win64
  

Resulted files unicorn.dll, unicorn.lib & samples/sample*.exe can then be used on Windows machine.

To run sample_x86.exe on Windows 32-bit, you need the following files:

    unicorn.dll
    %MSYS2%\mingw32\bin\libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
    %MSYS2%\mingw32\bin\libwinpthread-1.dll

To run sample_x86.exe on Windows 64-bit, you need the following files:

    unicorn.dll
    %MSYS2%\mingw64\bin\libgcc_s_seh-1.dll
    %MSYS2%\mingw64\bin\libwinpthread-1.dll

[3] Compile and install from source on Cygwin

To build Unicorn on Cygwin, run:

    $ ./make.sh

After compiling, install Unicorn with:

    $ ./make.sh install

Resulted files cygunicorn.dll, libunicorn.dll.a and libunicorn.a can be used on Cygwin but not native Windows.

NOTE: The core framework installed by "./make.sh install" consist of following files:

    /usr/include/unicorn/*.h
    /usr/bin/cygunicorn.dll
    /usr/lib/libunicorn.dll.a
    /usr/lib/libunicorn.a

[4] Cross-compile for Windows from *nix

To cross-compile for Windows, Linux & gcc-mingw-w64-i686 (and also gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64 for 64-bit binaries) are required.

• To cross-compile Windows 32-bit binary, simply run:

    $ ./make.sh cross-win32
  

• To cross-compile Windows 64-bit binary, run:

    $ ./make.sh cross-win64
  

Resulted files unicorn.dll, unicorn.lib & samples/sample*.exe can then be used on Windows machine.

To run sample_x86.exe on Windows 32-bit, you need the following files:

    unicorn.dll
    /usr/lib/gcc/i686-w64-mingw32/4.8/libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll
    /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/libwinpthread-1.dll

To run sample_x86.exe on Windows 64-bit, you need the following files:

    unicorn.dll
    /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/4.8/libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll
    /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libwinpthread-1.dll

Then run either "sample_x86.exe -32" or "sample_x86.exe -64" to test emulators for X86 32-bit or X86 64-bit. For other architectures, run "sample_xxx.exe" found in the same directory.

[5] Language bindings

Look for the bindings under directory bindings/, and refer to README file of corresponding languages.

[6] Unit tests

Automated unit tests use the cmocka unit testing framework (https://cmocka.org/). It can be installed in most Linux distros using the package manager, e.g. sudo yum install libcmocka libcmocka-devel, or you can easily build and install it from source.

You can run the tests by running make test in the project directory.