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CS456 - Systems Programming

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Exercise #5

This exercise is mostly more of the same of exercise #4. Convert the .c files to X86_64 assembly code. Once again to do this I recommend copying the .c file to the .s file and begin converting the code line by line.

And again:

  • It is not recommended that you use the syscall registers: rax, rdi, rsi, rdx, r10, r8 or r9 (or r11) for your main program except for system calls, use rbx or r12-r15. Preferably use memory for variable storage.

  • The "command line parameters" to your assembly program are placed on the stack for you by the kernel. They are located immediately before where the stack register (rsp) points to. The first parameter is "argc", the value of which would be at [rsp]. argv is then "above" that location, each pointer is 8 bytes, thus argv[0] is at [rsp+8], argv[1] at [rsp+16], etc. If the value at [rsp+n*8] == 0, then you are at the end of the arguments list.

    To access the first character of argv[1], placing it in r15 would then require:

  mov r14, [rsp+16]     ; loads address of argv[1] into r14. Remember that
                        ; argv[1] is a pointer (i.e. an address) to the
                        ; string, it must still be de-referenced.
  mov r15, BYTE [r14]   ; Move the byte at the address in r14 into r15.


Refer to exercise #4 for the argv.s code to access the command line parameters.

Furthermore the library is in its own sub-directory, so use 'lib/lib.h' as path to the header file in your .s files if you wish to use the library and its functions in your program.