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docs(docs): say which address space a report's offsets are in - #308

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docs(docs): say which address space a report's offsets are in#308
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@r0ny123 r0ny123 commented Aug 30, 2026

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A managed report's function and instruction offsets are file offsets. The native backends report virtual addresses. Nothing in the repository said so, so a consumer correlating a managed report with a native one — or with base_addr plus an RVA, or with any other tool's output — was silently comparing two different address spaces.

Two backends are affected, not one:

report.architecture what an offset is
intel, aarch64 a virtual address — base_addr plus an RVA
cil the offset of the method body in the assembly file
dalvik the offset of the code item in the DEX file

The two managed cases differ in why, which is worth recording. A CIL method has an RVA and CilDisassembler reports the file offset instead — that is a choice. A DEX carries no load address at all, so for Dalvik the file offset is the only address there is. The consequence for a consumer is identical either way: adding base_addr to one of them produces a number that means nothing.

The decision: document it, do not move it

The offsets are a public compatibility surface that downstream consumers index on. Converting them would change every stored managed report's addresses; carrying both would change the report schema. Either is a deliberate decision about the format rather than a bug fix, and neither belongs in a change that can be made without the people who consume it. What was actually missing is the statement.

The second half of the statement matters as much as the first: a report already names the backend that produced it, twice — report.architecture, and metadata.language in toDict(). So a consumer has what it needs to apply the right rule, once it knows there are two.

What changed

  • A README subsection under Usage, beside the raw-buffer section that covers the other thing about a report you cannot infer from it.
  • Class docstrings on CilDisassembler and DalvikDisassembler, at the places the conversion is actually made.
  • tests/testCilAddressSpace.py.

No behaviour change. The only edits under src/smda/** are docstrings.

The tests

Both halves pin the contract against a second parser, not against the file's length — with base_addr at 0 an address inside the image proves nothing about which space it is in, and that weaker assertion would pass on a report that had been converted to virtual addresses.

  • CIL, via dnfile: every recovered method sits at its body's file offset (MethodDef.Rva through get_offset_from_rva), and none sits at the virtual address of the same method (ImageBase + Rva). The second is the control that makes the first mean something.
  • Dalvik, via LIEF: all 2,219 recovered offsets on the bundled DEX fixture are code_offset values LIEF independently reports for the same file.
  • A third asserts the fields a consumer would branch on are actually populated, since the README now tells people to read them.

The Dalvik half is a correction to the first draft of this, which said offsets are virtual addresses on "every backend but one". That was wrong in the direction that matters: documenting only CIL would have told a consumer to read Dalvik offsets as addresses, the exact error the section exists to prevent.

Validation

ruff check / ruff format --check pass, full suite green on this branch rebased onto current master (1820 passed, 1 skipped, 2584 subtests). Diff coverage reports no measurable lines, because the only src/smda/** lines are docstrings.

Relationship to #299 and #300

This change is also sitting inside #299 and #300. Both of those were opened from branches that had my fork's master merged into them repeatedly, so their diffs are much wider than their titles suggest and they overlap each other as well.

This PR is the same change on its own, rebased onto current master, so it can be reviewed and measured for what it actually is. If you would rather take it through one of those, close this one; if you take this one, the matching hunks fall out of theirs on rebase.

The ty commit at the tip

The last commit on this branch is #302's fix, cherry-picked unchanged.

Master fails Code Quality on its own right now: 572acd7 bumped ty to 0.0.74, and its new unsound-return-statement / unsound-assignment rules become errors under [tool.ty.rules] all = "error". That is 41 errors across 15 files, none of which this PR touches — so every PR opened against master inherits a red check that says nothing about its own diff.

Carrying #302's commit here means this PR's CI reflects only this PR's work. It is the same commit, unmodified, so the moment #302 lands this one is empty and falls out on rebase — there is nothing to untangle later. If you would rather look at this branch without it, merge #302 first and I will drop it.

Checked against ty 0.0.74 itself rather than whatever an older local pin resolves to: on master it exits 1 with 41 errors, on this branch it exits 0 with none.

A managed report's function and instruction offsets are file offsets. Every
other backend reports virtual addresses. Nothing said so, so a consumer
correlating a .NET report with a native one -- or with any other tool's
output -- was comparing two different address spaces with no way to know.

Documented rather than changed. The offsets are a public compatibility
surface that downstream consumers index on, so moving them is a deliberate
decision about the report format and not a bug fix. What was missing was
the statement, and the fact that a report already names the backend that
produced it twice -- in `architecture` and in the language score map -- so
a consumer can tell which rule applies.

Adds a test that pins it in both directions: every recovered method sits at
its body's file offset, and none sits at the virtual address of the same
method. The second is the control -- on this fixture the two spaces are far
enough apart that only a report in the file's satisfies the first.
The first version of this said offsets are virtual addresses on "every
backend but one". That is wrong, and wrong in the direction that matters:
DalvikDisassembler.analyzeFunction addresses a method by its code item's
offset and each instruction by that plus its position in the bytecode, so a
Dalvik report is in the DEX file's space, not a virtual one. Documenting
only CIL told a consumer to read Dalvik offsets as addresses -- the exact
error the section exists to prevent.

Verified rather than read: on the bundled DEX fixture, all 2219 recovered
offsets are code-item offsets LIEF independently reports for the same file.

The README now names all four backends in a table, and records why the two
managed cases differ. A CIL method has an RVA and reporting the file offset
instead is a choice; a DEX carries no load address at all, so the file
offset is the only address there is. Adding base_addr to either produces a
number that means nothing, which is what a consumer needs to know.

The Dalvik test cross-checks against LIEF rather than against the file's
length: with base_addr at 0 an address inside the image proves nothing
about which space it is in.
Keep the 0.0.74 bump and satisfy the new unsound-return/assignment/yield
rules with annotations on the public DTO and helper surfaces. Ignore ty
in Dependabot so the next patch release cannot redden master unattended.
@danielplohmann
danielplohmann merged commit 316c2bc into danielplohmann:master Sep 7, 2026
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@r0ny123
r0ny123 deleted the upstream-docs-report-address-space branch September 7, 2026 17:38
danielplohmann added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 8, 2026
* chore: draft the v4.5.1 release notes

The changelog entry for what has landed since v4.5.0 (6cc5aca): #302, #303,
#304, #305, #306, #307, #308, #310 and #316, plus the Dependabot ty bump
572acd7 that #302 had to answer for.

Held as a draft rather than a release. The version is deliberately NOT
bumped here -- #309, #311 and #312 are reviewed and wanted but waiting on a
rebase, and splitting one coherent accuracy pass across two releases makes
both entries weaker. What this commit does is stop the writeup living in a
scratchpad while that happens.

To finish it: add sections for #309, #311 and #312, bump VERSION in
src/smda/SmdaConfig.py and __version__ in src/smda/__init__.py, and move the
date to the actual release day.

No escaper output changed anywhere in this set -- the only edit to
intel/definitions.py adds two GAP_SEQUENCES entries, which feed padding
detection and not escaping, and testEscaperFingerprint passes unchanged --
so ESCAPER_DOWNWARD_COMPATIBILITY stays at 4.4.5 and
INTEL_PIC_HASH_ESCAPE_VERSION at 4.3.5, and no report needs reprocessing.

Figures are the contributors' own except where this session reproduced them,
and the two that were reproduced are stated as measured here: the padding
cut's analysis-time cost (+3.4% claimed, +3.84% measured) and the fixture
movement on rust_pe_gnu_xored (+26 real starts against +8 false, scored
against that fixture's own COFF symbol table rather than the corpus macro
mean).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore: fold #318 into the v4.5.1 release notes

#318 landed as 395c88d after this entry was written. Its five corrections go
under Housekeeping: the README's metadata.language claim, the restored
`-> bool`, the ruff-check hook rename, the GAP_SEQUENCES reach note, and the
docstring on the queue-rebuild test.

Keeping this current as things merge is the point of the branch existing, so
it does not go stale between now and the release.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore: cut v4.5.1

Finishes the draft now that #309, #311 and #312 have landed. Adds their
sections, bumps `VERSION` and `__version__` to 4.5.1, and moves the date to the
release day.

The three new entries: #309's exception-directory refusal of interior gap
candidates on x64, with the chained-versus-primary distinction and the
seeding-is-not-suppression principle that keeps carved records out of it; #311's
four candidate-quality defects, including the corrected entry at `0x40df30` on
`aarch64_static_xored` and the metadata-coverage gate; and #312's ARM64
counterpart, which reconstructs the extent an ARM64 `RUNTIME_FUNCTION` does not
carry and hoists the shared lookup into `common/`.

`USE_MACHO_ADDRESS_REF_CANDIDATES` gets its own **Defaults changed** section. It
is the only default whose value moves in this release, it changes recovery
output on Mach-O input with no action by the caller, and a default going from
off to on inside a follow-ups PR is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost.

The closing movement section is rewritten to describe v4.5.0 -> v4.5.1 rather
than any single PR, and both figures in it were measured on this tree against
independent truth rather than quoted:

  rust_pe_gnu_xored, vs its 2,186 retained COFF .text function symbols
    2,355 -> 2,201 starts, +26 real / -180 false
    recall    92.452% -> 93.641%
    precision 85.817% -> 93.003%

  11-sample ARM64 Mach-O corpus, vs LC_FUNCTION_STARTS (2,056 truth)
    TP 1,787 -> 1,818, FP 1,113 -> 1,107
    recall 86.916% -> 88.424%, no sample losing recall

Two headline figures are marked as the contributor's own because they cannot be
reproduced here at all: the `bti j` 803/0 split, since no bundled fixture holds
a single `bti j` word, and #312's ARM64 PE result, since a scan of all 104
fixture files finds 8 i386 PEs, 4 AMD64, one ReadyToRun image and no `0xAA64`.
Saying which figures are ours and which are theirs is more useful than a uniform
tone of confidence.

`Turtle_5f9cd91d8d1d`'s 12 dropped starts are attributed rather than left as an
unexplained delta: they bisect to #307's inbound-call fix and fall inside the
175 false positives that change already measured, and the sample carries no
LC_FUNCTION_STARTS to score them against individually.

Closes #319

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MDCLUmqGzE5fwJqUWsSStr

* chore: record binweight's serialized type change in the v4.5.1 entry

Left open as a question in yesterday's review and resolved as "yes, it belongs
in the entry". #302 moved `SmdaFunction.binweight`'s class default from int `0`
to float `0.0` while clearing ty 0.0.74's diagnostics, and `binweight` is
serialized through `toDict()`.

The blast radius is small but real: the per-block accumulation already adds
`float(...)`, so every function with at least one block was a float before this
release too. Only a function with no blocks -- a zero-function or error report
-- keeps the class default, and that value now writes as `0.0` where it wrote
`0`. Verified on both trees rather than reasoned about: `SmdaFunction.binweight`
is `0` at 6cc5aca and `0.0` at d111548.

MCRIT stores these reports, so a consumer diffing them byte-for-byte will see
it even though nothing reads the field as an integer. That is exactly the kind
of change that costs someone an afternoon if it is not written down.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MDCLUmqGzE5fwJqUWsSStr

* chore: fold the two remaining #317 items into the v4.5.1 entry

#320 and #321 finish the review pass that #318 started, so the release entry
should carry all seven of its corrections rather than five.

Both are behaviour-neutral typing work, but the Housekeeping text says what each
one actually decided rather than listing them as annotations: `blocks` being
typed forces the PIC/OPC hash path to refuse an instruction with no bytes
instead of blanking it, and `extract_strings` could not be narrowed until three
helpers and three `SmdaReport` attributes were declared first.

Behaviour-neutrality is stated with the evidence rather than as a claim -- the
corpus benchmark ran on #320 and reports 0 of 155 files differing across
175,946 functions, which is a stronger statement than the bundled fixtures can
make.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MDCLUmqGzE5fwJqUWsSStr

* chore: format the v4.5.1 entry as a nested list

@r0ny123 asked on #319 whether the changelog could be formatted as a list to
make it easier to read. At ~2,700 words on a single line, this entry was the one
that provoked the question, so it gets the treatment now rather than waiting for
the wider keep-a-changelog adoption tracked in #323.

Deliberately narrow: only the v4.5.1 entry changes shape. The other 192 entries
keep the one-line format, because converting them is a large, low-value rewrite
that loses nuance in translation, and #323 proposes preserving them verbatim
under an `Older releases` heading instead.

Structure is the release summary as the top-level bullet, one sub-bullet per
section, and a further level inside the three sections that cover more than one
change -- Recovery (intel) splits into the switch-table fix, the alignment cut
and the exception-directory refusal; Recovery (AArch64) into the inbound-call
fix, the BTI work and the candidate-quality follow-ups; Housekeeping into the
`ty` bump, the `ruff` pin, the five #318 corrections, the `binweight`
serialization note and the two #317 typing items.

The text is unchanged. Verified mechanically rather than by eye: stripping list
markers and collapsing whitespace gives a string identical to the original entry.
The two exceptions are disclosed rather than silent -- the first sub-bullet of
Recovery (intel) and of Recovery (AArch64) had their opening letter capitalised,
because splitting the section header onto its own line left them starting a
bullet mid-sentence. Housekeeping's opens on a code span and needed nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MDCLUmqGzE5fwJqUWsSStr

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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