IDA v5.4 release is not that far away – Hex Rays

I’m happy to inform you that we are entering the beta stage of IDA v5.4!
In addition to numerous small and not that small improvements, the new version will have three debugger modules: bochs, gdb, and windbg, selectable on the fly (the active debugger session will be closed, though ;))

• With the bochs debugger, we offer three different worlds: run-any-code-snippet facility, windows-like-environment for PE files, and any-bochs-image bare-bone machine emulation mode. You can read more about this module in our blog: /blog/bochs-plugin-goes-alpha
• With gdb, x86 and arm targets are supported. Among other things, it is possible to connect IDA to QEMU or debug a virtual machine inside VMWare. We tried it iPhone as well. However, while it works in some curcimstances, there were some problems on the gdbserver side.
• With windbg, user and kernel mode debugging is available. The debugger engine from Microsoft, which is currently the only choice for driver and kernel mode debugging, can be used from IDA. It can automatically load required PDB files and populate the listing with meaningful names, types, etc. Speaking of PDB files, IDA imports more information from them: local function variables and types are retrieved too, c++ base classes are handled, etc.

The gdb and windbg debugger modules support local and remote debugging. We tried to make the debugger modules as open as possible: target-specific commands can be sent to all backend engines in a very easy and user-friendly way.
As usual, better analysis and many minor changes have been made. If you spend plenty of time analyzing gcc generated binaries, you’ll certainly appreciate that IDA handles its weird way of preparing outgoing function arguments. Now it can trace and find arguments copies to the stack with mov statements.
The new IDA will support Python out of box, thanks to Gergely Erdelyi, who kindly agreed the Python plugin to be included in the official distribution. In fact, the main IDA window will have a command line to enter any python (or other language) expressions and immediately get a result in the message window.
We will prepare the detailed list of improvements later this week.