Depending on the CPU architecture, some computers can run software with some specific instruction set. Using these instructions can greatly improve the speed of the program, but can also lead to crashes when not supported.
But sometimes, when shipping a software that depends on external libraries (binaries), we may want to check what instruction set they rely on (like AVX2, SSE2, etc) and assess if we can use safely this library or executable (e.g.: on Windows, a .lib, .dll or an .exe). Mostly when the final executable has to be shipped to hardware that is out of our control, but should follow some specifications.
Most of the related questions seems to tackle the problem the other way around: from the software, to check if a set of instruction is supported on the current hardware:
- how verify that operating system support avx2 instructions
- Detecting SIMD instruction sets to be used with C++ Macros in Visual Studio 2015
How one can check, from the binary, what kind of instruction sets are required or used? Is there some OS tools for that?
The OSs of interest would be Windows, Linux and MacOS.
