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Pcodetest is more about validating the implementation of the instruction, sure it has to decode, but the benefit is most a base level set of logic that can be emulated. And definitely not a fan of the setup to get it going (also only helpful if you have a semi recent C compiler)

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Oh nice, it wasn't clear from the test suite if that was the case, I'll give it a closer look.

Judging from the python scripts, it seems to expect a whole binutils toolchain (so not just compiler but also objdump, readelf...) and that would be a blocker for me.

Compiler (gcc) and maybe assembler (as) are used. I think the other binutils executables are unused but still built-in to their logic. Due to it's age and being removed from gcc, I was unable to cleanly setup pcodetest for 80960 (had to hack it all together and scripted their java portion to work with hack), but was super useful for improving tricore (pcodetest wasn't released when I submitted original PR) and writing risc-v.

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