SPO600 Lab 3

For our third lab we split up in groups to write some assembly, we started by looking at some x86_64 assembler, after which we looked at the differences between that and aarch64 assembler.

Our first assignment was to build a simple loop that loops from 0-9 and displays "Loop: [the current number] \n" of the loop. In order to convert our loop number to an ASCII-character we have to add 48 to the number because this is the offset of characters where the 0 starts in ASCII. We did this by moving 48 into an empty register that doesn't get trampled at the start of the program. Then in the loop we moved the loop number into an empty register, added 48 from the previous register and wrote the result into the rsi register(message location register).
At first we had our string in a .rodata section, this stands for read-only, so when we tried to write into it, nothing happened. We fixed this by removing the ro to spell .data
Next we did not realise that mov moves the full 64 bytes. Even if you only had 1 byte of data.
This caused our number's move to overwrite the newline character at the end of the original string. This is fixed by adding the b suffix to mov and the register you wish to move it from. So it becomes something like: movb %r13b,(msg+6).
On aarch64 moving into the message with an offset was a little bit different, but otherwise the instructions were similar.

Next we changed it so the loop would print from 00-30. This used the div instruction, which takes the rax register and divides it by a chosen register. It stores the result into rax and the remainder into rdx. We divided the loop number by 10, added our offset of 48 to rax and rdx and moved them into the string as we had done in the previous assignment.
One thing to pay attention to: before using the div operation, the rdx register has to be set to 0!
On aarch64 this was similar, but you had to use msub to calculate the remainder.

The last assignment was supressing the first digit when the number was below 10 We did this by checking if the quotient was zero, if it was, we use je(jump if equal) or be(branch if equal) to jump to a label past the mov assignment to move the first digit into the register.

Tips and tricks:
as -g -o filename.o filename.s; ld -o filename filename.o; ./filename compiles and executes a source file in one statement.
Make sure you know whether you are on least significant byte first architecture or most significant byte architecture as it could heavily influence the result of moving a specific byte somewhere.
Copy your files regularly so if you add to a file and you break it, you still have a working copy to try something new on.

Observations about the differences between aarch64 and x86_64 assembler:
- If you need just the remainder on aarch64 you still have to divide, where you get the remainder built in on x86_64
- When moving just a byte on aarch64 you specify a 32 bit-wide register and you work with an offset, whereas on x86_64 you have the option to specify byte sized.