Simplest assembly program for gnu assembler(gas)

[681ankit]

Hello, I am trying to learn programming using gas.But I did not find any tutorial that will show me the simplest program sample that I can run on my PC.
I searched over Internet from a day, but I didn't find it.

I want a sample code that will store(move) value 1 into register eax and steps for assembling and loading ..thanks..That will surely help me to get started , into writing the assembly language programs..
thanks..

[ehrt74]

Here's a fairly short example:

.section .text

        .globl main
main:   
        movl $1, %eax
        movl $5, %ebx

        int $0x80

save as myprogram.s and compile and run with:

gcc myprogram.s
./a.out
echo $?

Taken (with some changes) from: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

[681ankit]

thanks for reply .. I got it now..

[ehrt74]

There's one thing worth mentioning as the book has certain problems. The world has changed since 2002!

For example, the book states that an assembly program starts at the _start label. I tried this, and it didn't compile, so I wrote a minimum C program:

int main() {
  return 2;
}

and compiled it with

> gcc myfile.c -S -O5

to see what the current convention is. If you ever get stuck because of changes, this could be a good method to use.

[trent.josephsen]

Good job omitting the step where _start comes in. The assembly output of a C compiler is not equivalent to what you would write if you were programming in "raw" assembly. For instance, the label "main" is only meaningful in C, which is why that program won't do anything if you assemble it without using gcc (gcc links against libc). I don't know what problem you had with _start but I imagine it might be related to using gcc as an assembler.

If you want to see what gcc actually outputs, disassemble the binary (Note this is not recommended as a way to learn assembly! It contains a lot of libc nonsense that you would not write).

$ gcc -o file file.c
$ objdump -d file

[ehrt74]

trent.josephsen is quite correct that you can assemble and link an executable without using the label 'main'. an example would be:

.section .text

        .globl _start
_start:   
        movl $1, %eax
        movl $5, %ebx

        int $0x80

which you would then assemble, link and run by entering:

> as myfile.s -o myfile.o
> ld -s myfile.o -o myfile
> ./myfile

Hope this adds to the general confusion