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Snowman: Build Instructions

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

Snowman is written in C++. So, you will need a C++ compiler to build it. The following compilers are known to work:

The following software packages must be installed before Snowman can be built:

For installation instructions for the above packages, please refer to the respective web pages and/or your operating system’s manual.

Note
 If you want to use Visual Studio 2012 to build applications that would run on Windows XP, you have to install Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 or later and at configuration step choose v110_xp toolset in CMake using -T switch (support since CMake 2.8.11, known to work with Visual Studio generators).

Notes on Building IDA Plug-In

  1. The following additional package is required to build IDA plug-in:

  2. You must use the same compiler as the one used by IDA and the same version of Qt (different patch levels of the same major.minor version are binary compatible and work too):

    • IDA 6.1 — MSVC 2010 — Qt 4.7.2.

    • IDA 6.3 — MSVC 2010 — Qt 4.8.1.

    • IDA 6.4 — MSVC 2010 — Qt 4.8.1.

    • IDA 6.5 — MSVC 2010 — Qt 4.8.4.

    • IDA 6.95 — MSVC 2015 — Qt 5.6.0.

  3. Qt must be built in namespace QT, e.g.:

    configure.exe -qtnamespace QT -platform win32-msvc2010 -debug-and-release -opensource -no-qt3support -no-multimedia -no-audio-backend -no-phonon -no-webkit -no-script -no-scripttools -nomake demos -nomake examples && nmake

    or, on Linux:

    CXX=g++ CC=gcc ./configure -qtnamespace QT -platform linux-g++-32 -debug-and-release -confirm-license -opensource -no-qt3support -no-multimedia -no-audio-backend -no-phonon -no-webkit -no-script -no-scripttools -nomake demos -nomake examples -prefix /home/yegor/opt/qt-4.8.4-32 && make && make install

  4. You must must build decompiler in Release mode, because this is the one used by IDA. Otherwise, you will end up linked against debug Qt library, while IDA uses the release version. Nothing good comes out of this.

Building

Snowman is built using a tool called CMake. The build process consists of two steps: configuration and build.

Setting up the Environment

You can help your system to find CMake and CMake to find the compiler and required libraries at non-standard locations by setting the following environment variables. Alternatively, you may specify these locations at configuration step.

  1. Add CMake and the compiler to your PATH.

  2. Set BOOST_ROOT to the path to Boost installation directory (it should contain boost subdirectory with header files).

  3. Set QTDIR to the path to the Qt installation directory (it should contain include and lib subdirectories).

  4. Set IDA_SDK_DIR to the IDA SDK installation directory (it should contain include and lib) subdirectories.

Configuration Step

CMake authors are advocates of out-of-tree builds, so a separate directory for compilation results must be created:

cd /path/to/decompiler && mkdir build && cd build && cmake ../src

You can specify a toolchain using CMake’s -G switch, e.g.:

  • -G "Visual Studio 10" — generate a Visual Studio 2010 solution for building 32-bit application.

  • -G "Visual Studio 11 Win64" — generate a Visual Studio 2012 solution for building 64-bit application.

  • -G "MinGW Makefiles" — generate Makefiles for building by MinGW GCC and mingw32-make.

You can choose a build mode (Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, or MinSizeRel):

  • -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

If you have built Qt in a namespace, do not forget to specify this, e.g.:

  • -D QT_NAMESPACE=QT

You can choose whether to build the IDA plug-in and which one to build:

  • -D IDA_PLUGIN_ENABLED=YES (or NO, defaults to YES when IDA Pro SDK is found).

  • -D IDA_64_BIT_EA_T=YES (YES to build .p64 version for handling 64-bit code, NO for building .plw version for handling 32-bit code).

You can choose to build 32-bit code on 64-bit Linux machine:

  • -D NC_M32=YES.

You can choose between Qt5 and Qt4:

  • -D NC_QT5=YES (YES for Qt5, NO for Qt4).

You can set the installation prefix:

  • -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/install/prefix

Note
 The build mode specified at the configuration step will not have any effect for builds by Visual Studio. There you can choose the build mode using --config option of CMake directly at build and installation steps.
Note
 On Windows, when choosing release or debug mode, make sure that Qt has been built in this mode too. If it was not, the build may fail, or even succeed but produce non-working executables.

Build Step

cmake --build .

Installation Step

cmake --build . --target install
Note
 On Windows, when the decompiler is built with Qt4, this command will install to the same directory all non-system .dll files on which the decompiler executables depend, so that the installation can be painlessly moved to any other machine and remain workable.
Note
 When IDA plug-in is enabled, it is the only target which is installed. The rationale is that IDA is thread-unsafe, and multithreading is disabled in the builds with plug-in enabled. This gives you less chances to install single-threaded standalone version of the decompiler (which you should not normally want).