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1 Introduction

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24 views7 pages

1 Introduction

Uploaded by

kimdrew715
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CSC216

Assembly language
programming
Requirements
 Assembler: Netwide assembler (NASM)
 An assembler for the Intel x86 architecture.
 It can be used in both Linux and Windows
 It can be download from the internet
 We will assume the IA-32 instruction set (Intel Architecture, 32-bit)
Parts of an assembly language program
 Data section/segment: For declaring variables/constants that are
initialised
 Specified using the instruction section .data
 BSS section/segment: used for declaring variables that are not
initialised and allocating memory to them
 It is specified using the instruction section .bss
 text section/segment: contains the actual code.
 Specified using the instruction section .text
 It must begin with the instruction global _start which tell the
kernel where the program execution begins
 The semicolon (;) is used to signal the start of a comment. Comments
can be on their own line or after an instruction
Assembly language statements
 Generally, there are three types of statements
 Instructions: An instruction is specified by an opcode. Each opcode
generates one machine instruction
 Assembler directives (pseudo-ops): These tell the assembler what to
do during the assembly process
 Macros: These are a text substitution mechanism. One macro can
result into one or several instructions.

Assembly language statements syntax
 Instructions are usually entered one per line
 The follow the format
[label] opcode [operands] [;comment]
 Examples
INC i ; increments the variable i by one
MOV [total], 48 ; transfer 48 to the variable total
Hello Kenya program
section .text
global _start ;must be declared for linker (ld)

_start: ;tells linker entry point


mov edx,len ;message length
mov ecx,msg ;message to write
mov ebx,1 ;file descriptor (stdout)
mov eax,4 ;system call number (sys_write)
int 0x80 ;call kernel

mov eax,1 ;system call number (sys_exit)


int 0x80 ;call kernel

section .data
msg db 'Hello Kenya!', 0xa ;string to be printed
len equ $ - msg ;length of the string
Assembling
 To assemble the code, use the command below
> nasm -f elf hello.asm
 Elf stands for executable and linkable format
 The -f option is used to specify the output file format. Example
formats are elf32(elf), elf64, win32, win64,
 After assembling, link using the command below
> ld -m elf_i386 -s hello.o -o hello
 Then run the program by typing
 >./hello

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