分类： LINUX
2011-04-12 16:49:06
Copyright (C)2003 Sandeep S.
This document is free; you can redistribute and/or modify this under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This document is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Kindly forward feedback and criticism to . I will be indebted to anybody who points out errors and inaccuracies in this document; I shall rectify them as soon as I am informed.
I express my sincere appreciation to GNU people for providing such a great feature. Thanks to Mr.Pramode C E for all the helps he did. Thanks to friends at the Govt Engineering College, Trichur for their moral-support and cooperation, especially to Nisha Kurur and Sakeeb S. Thanks to my dear teachers at Govt Engineering College, Trichur for their cooperation.
Additionally, thanks to Phillip, Brennan Underwood and colin@nyx.net; Many things here are shamelessly stolen from their works.
We are here to learn about GCC inline assembly. What this inline stands for?
We can instruct the compiler to insert the code of a function into the code of its callers, to the point where actually the call is to be made. Such functions are inline functions. Sounds similar to a Macro? Indeed there are similarities.
What is the benefit of inline functions?
This method of inlining reduces the function-call overhead. And if any of the actual argument values are constant, their known values may permit simplifications at compile time so that not all of the inline function’s code needs to be included. The effect on code size is less predictable, it depends on the particular case. To declare an inline function, we’ve to use the keyword inline in its declaration.
Now we are in a position to guess what is inline assembly. Its just some assembly routines written as inline functions. They are handy, speedy and very much useful in system programming. Our main focus is to study the basic format and usage of (GCC) inline assembly functions. To declare inline assembly functions, we use the keyword asm.
Inline assembly is important primarily because of its ability to operate and make its output visible on C variables. Because of this capability, "asm" works as an interface between the assembly instructions and the "C" program that contains it.
GCC, the GNU C Compiler for Linux, uses AT&T/UNIX assembly syntax. Here we’ll be using AT&T syntax for assembly coding. Don’t worry if you are not familiar with AT&T syntax, I will teach you. This is quite different from Intel syntax. I shall give the major differences.
The direction of the operands in AT&T syntax is opposite to that of Intel. In Intel syntax the first operand is the destination, and the second operand is the source whereas in AT&T syntax the first operand is the source and the second operand is the destination. ie,
"Op-code dst src" in Intel syntax changes to
"Op-code src dst" in AT&T syntax.
Register names are prefixed by % ie, if eax is to be used, write %eax.
AT&T immediate operands are preceded by ’$’. For static "C" variables also prefix a ’$’. In Intel syntax, for hexadecimal constants an ’h’ is suffixed, instead of that, here we prefix ’0x’ to the constant. So, for hexadecimals, we first see a ’$’, then ’0x’ and finally the constants.
In AT&T syntax the size of memory operands is determined from the last character of the op-code name. Op-code suffixes of ’b’, ’w’, and ’l’ specify byte(8-bit), word(16-bit), and long(32-bit) memory references. Intel syntax accomplishes this by prefixing memory operands (not the op-codes) with ’byte ptr’, ’word ptr’, and ’dword ptr’.
Thus, Intel "mov al, byte ptr foo" is "movb foo, %al" in AT&T syntax.
In Intel syntax the base register is enclosed in ’[’ and ’]’ where as in AT&T they change to ’(’ and ’)’. Additionally, in Intel syntax an indirect memory reference is like
section:[base + index*scale + disp], which changes to
section:disp(base, index, scale) in AT&T.
One point to bear in mind is that, when a constant is used for disp/scale, ’$’ shouldn’t be prefixed.
Now we saw some of the major differences between Intel syntax and AT&T syntax. I’ve wrote only a few of them. For a complete information, refer to GNU Assembler documentations. Now we’ll look at some examples for better understanding.
+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Intel Code | AT&T Code |
+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| mov eax,1 | movl $1,%eax |
| mov ebx,0ffh | movl $0xff,%ebx |
| int 80h | int $0x80 |
| mov ebx, eax | movl %eax, %ebx |
| mov eax,[ecx] | movl (%ecx),%eax |
| mov eax,[ebx+3] | movl 3(%ebx),%eax |
| mov eax,[ebx+20h] | movl 0x20(%ebx),%eax |
| add eax,[ebx+ecx*2h] | addl (%ebx,%ecx,0x2),%eax |
| lea eax,[ebx+ecx] | leal (%ebx,%ecx),%eax |
| sub eax,[ebx+ecx*4h-20h] | subl -0x20(%ebx,%ecx,0x4),%eax |
+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
The format of basic inline assembly is very much straight forward. Its basic form is
asm("assembly code");
Example.
asm("movl %ecx %eax"); /* moves the contents of ecx to eax */
__asm__("movb %bh (%eax)"); /*moves the byte from bh to the memory pointed by eax */
You might have noticed that here I’ve used asm and __asm__. Both are valid. We can use __asm__ if the keyword asm conflicts with something in our program. If we have more than one instructions, we write one per line in double quotes, and also suffix a ’\n’ and ’\t’ to the instruction. This is because gcc sends each instruction as a string to as(GAS) and by using the newline/tab we send correctly formatted lines to the assembler.
Example.
__asm__ ("movl %eax, %ebx\n\t"
"movl $56, %esi\n\t"
"movl %ecx, $label(%edx,%ebx,$4)\n\t"
"movb %ah, (%ebx)");
If in our code we touch (ie, change the contents) some registers and return from asm without fixing those changes, something bad is going to happen. This is because GCC have no idea about the changes in the register contents and this leads us to trouble, especially when compiler makes some optimizations. It will suppose that some register contains the value of some variable that we might have changed without informing GCC, and it continues like nothing happened. What we can do is either use those instructions having no side effects or fix things when we quit or wait for something to crash. This is where we want some extended functionality. Extended asm provides us with that functionality.
In basic inline assembly, we had only instructions. In extended assembly, we can also specify the operands. It allows us to specify the input registers, output registers and a list of clobbered registers. It is not mandatory to specify the registers to use, we can leave that head ache to GCC and that probably fit into GCC’s optimization scheme better. Anyway the basic format is:
asm ( assembler template
: output operands /* optional */
: input operands /* optional */
: list of clobbered registers /* optional */
);
The assembler template consists of assembly instructions. Each operand is described by an operand-constraint string followed by the C expression in parentheses. A colon separates the assembler template from the first output operand and another separates the last output operand from the first input, if any. Commas separate the operands within each group. The total number of operands is limited to ten or to the maximum number of operands in any instruction pattern in the machine description, whichever is greater.
If there are no output operands but there are input operands, you must place two consecutive colons surrounding the place where the output operands would go.
Example:
asm ("cld\n\t"
"rep\n\t"
"stosl"
: /* no output registers */
: "c" (count), "a" (fill_value), "D" (dest)
: "%ecx", "%edi"
);
Now, what does this code do? The above inline fills the fill_value count times to the location pointed to by the register edi. It also says to gcc that, the contents of registers eax and edi are no longer valid. Let us see one more example to make things more clearer.
int a=10, b;
asm ("movl %1, %%eax;
movl %%eax, %0;"
:"=r"(b) /* output */
:"r"(a) /* input */
:"%eax" /* clobbered register */
);
Here what we did is we made the value of ’b’ equal to that of ’a’ using assembly instructions. Some points of interest are:
When the execution of "asm" is complete, "b" will reflect the updated value, as it is specified as an output operand. In other words, the change made to "b" inside "asm" is supposed to be reflected outside the "asm".
Now we may look each field in detail.
The assembler template contains the set of assembly instructions that gets inserted inside the C program. The format is like: either each instruction should be enclosed within double quotes, or the entire group of instructions should be within double quotes. Each instruction should also end with a delimiter. The valid delimiters are newline(\n) and semicolon(;). ’\n’ may be followed by a tab(\t). We know the reason of newline/tab, right?. Operands corresponding to the C expressions are represented by %0, %1 ... etc.
C expressions serve as operands for the assembly instructions inside "asm". Each operand is written as first an operand constraint in double quotes. For output operands, there’ll be a constraint modifier also within the quotes and then follows the C expression which stands for the operand. ie,
"constraint" (C expression) is the general form. For output operands an additional modifier will be there. Constraints are primarily used to decide the addressing modes for operands. They are also used in specifying the registers to be used.
If we use more than one operand, they are separated by comma.
In the assembler template, each operand is referenced by numbers. Numbering is done as follows. If there are a total of n operands (both input and output inclusive), then the first output operand is numbered 0, continuing in increasing order, and the last input operand is numbered n-1. The maximum number of operands is as we saw in the previous section.
Output operand expressions must be lvalues. The input operands are not restricted like this. They may be expressions. The extended asm feature is most often used for machine instructions the compiler itself does not know as existing ;-). If the output expression cannot be directly addressed (for example, it is a bit-field), our constraint must allow a register. In that case, GCC will use the register as the output of the asm, and then store that register contents into the output.
As stated above, ordinary output operands must be write-only; GCC will assume that the values in these operands before the instruction are dead and need not be generated. Extended asm also supports input-output or read-write operands.
So now we concentrate on some examples. We want to multiply a number by 5. For that we use the instruction lea.
asm ("leal (%1,%1,4), %0"
: "=r" (five_times_x)
: "r" (x)
);
Here our input is in ’x’. We didn’t specify the register to be used. GCC will choose some register for input, one for output and does what we desired. If we want the input and output to reside in the same register, we can instruct GCC to do so. Here we use those types of read-write operands. By specifying proper constraints, here we do it.
asm ("leal (%0,%0,4), %0"
: "=r" (five_times_x)
: "0" (x)
);
Now the input and output operands are in the same register. But we don’t know which register. Now if we want to specify that also, there is a way.
asm ("leal (%%ecx,%%ecx,4), %%ecx"
: "=c" (x)
: "c" (x)
);
In all the three examples above, we didn’t put any register to the clobber list. why? In the first two examples, GCC decides the registers and it knows what changes happen. In the last one, we don’t have to put ecx on the c lobberlist, gcc knows it goes into x. Therefore, since it can know the value of ecx, it isn’t considered clobbered.