This is a tiny project to be a quick alternative to symchk for generating
manifests. This mimics symchk of the form symchk /om manifest /r <path>
but only looks for MZ/PE files.
Due to symchk doing some weird things it can often crash or get stuck in infinite loops. Thus this is a stricter (and much faster) alternative.
The output manifest is compatible with symchk. If you want to use symchk
in lieu of this tool, use symchk /im manifest /s <symbol path>
Note that we currently offer no guarantee of stability for the command-line options of this tool. If you need stability, please install a specific version.
```
cargo run --release -- manifest C:\Windows\System32
cargo run --release -- download SRVC:\Symbolshttps://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols ```
More configuration could be done through command line parameters. Such as number of threads for downloads and symbol paths.
Randomizing the order of the files in the manifest would make downloads more consistant by not having any filesystem locality bias in the files.
Deduping the files in the manifests could also help, but this isn't a big deal shrug
This tool tries to do everything in memory if it can. Lists all files first then does all the parsing (this has random accesses to files without mapping so it could be improved, but it doesn't really seem to be an issue, this random access only occurs if it sees an MZ and PE header and everything is valid).
It also generates the manifest in memory and dumps it out in one swoop, this is one large bottleneck original symchk has.
Then for downloads it chomps through a manifest file asynchronously, at up to
16 files at the same time! The original symchk only peaks at about 3-4 Mbps
of network usage, but this tool saturates my internet connection at
400 Mbps.
Look how damn fast this stuff is!
``` On an offline machine:
PS C:\users\pleb\Downloads> .\pdblister.exe manifest C:\ Generating file listing... Done! Parsed 398632 of 398632 files (23051 pdbs)
On an online machine:
C:\dev\pdblister>cargo run --release download
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.0 secs
Running target\release\pdblister.exe download
Trying to download 23051 PDBs
```