download default PDFs?

[psifertex]

Is there a list of architecture PDFs that are known to work out of the box? Might be nice if the plugin would initialize by automatically downloading a common set.

[amtal]

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets... This workflow's great for experienced deep-dives but is pretty lacking for beginners.

Unfortunately I think the pragmatic choice of defaulting to the most general manual available is wrong when switching to a new architecture. You want the simplest manual that's sufficient for your target, which is often from another vendor for 8/16-bit stuff, or an old ARM doc predating all the extensions your target doesn't have.

Problem Space

Even within the common architecture plugins:

• Do you want the iconic Intel or laconic AMD x86_64 docs?
• Should aarch64 load the full A-profile A.R.M., or is the much slimmer M-profile sufficient?
• Latest revision armv7 docs, or something closely matching age and capabilities of your target?
• Chase bleeding edge Xilinx (well, AMD) errata and 64bit architecture extension docs, or point at a stale mirror and eventually get raked by it?

It gets worse when looking at MMIO/peripherals/hypervisor docs.

Possible Solutions

Ghidra correctly punts the issue to the user. I like one 3rd party solution that ignores licensing issues by using various public Texan and Ukrainian archives as everyone does at some point.

A likely partial solution that doesn't need deep expertise but is still useful if you have it is to histogram instructions/registers in a binary and "unit test" available docs. This thing's 90% of the way to a RAG already, but even getting a text report on which instructions/registers are found/not found in which PDFs could be handy.

The first step IMO is having an easy to manage and access folder. Ideally it should be a single place - the thing pulling PDFs out of siblings is a personal hack for some architecture plugins. "Droog//Open Manuals Folder..." maybe, auto-creating and browsing to the architecture-tagged file? I also like keeping it in the plugin repo, wherever that's installed to, since it allows directories to be pre-created. (Assuming that repo doesn't get read-only'd on Linux or something.)