andyvanee

Assembly Language For Mac

I’m away from my Linux box and want to do some assembly programming. Mac installs GCC with the developer tools, but there are enough differences that I haven’t bothered to work through them until now. Here’s a decent tutorial, although it focuses on PPC assembly and I’m using an Intel Mac. The thing that frightened me about the Mac assembler was the default output of gcc -S. There is some strange optimizations and flags in the resulting assembly code. The key, as the tutorial points out, is in the compiler options. Here’s what I used on the ubiquitous “Hello World” program:

gcc -S -fno-PIC -O2 -Wall -o hello.s hello.c

And here’s the assembly code it spit out:

.cstring
LC0:
   .ascii "Hello World!%d\12\0"
   .text
   .align 4,0x90

.globl _main
   _main:
   pushl   %ebp
   movl    %esp, %ebp
   subl    $24, %esp
   movl    $12, 4(%esp)
   movl    $LC0, (%esp)
   call    _printf
   xorl    %eax, %eax
   leave
   ret
   .subsections_via_symbols

This is more familiar territory, the only differences being the .cstring directive instead of .section .text, the leading underscore on printf, and the .subsections_via_symbols directive. The general naming of sections is outlined on the Mac Assembler Reference, and the .subsections_via_symbols explanation is interesting. I’m already used to using many labels in my code; does this mean that the named sections would be ripped out because they are not “called” by any other code? I tested this out in the previous example, just adding a second call to _printf in a labelled section and the code worked just fine. It seems that labels don’t count, they have to be declared sections like .globl, .section or whatever. That seems fair, I haven’t yet made a habit of calling sections that are supposed to flow naturally into other sections. Maybe there is some instance where this might be a useful optimization? I will be looking into Position Independent Code(PIC) a bit more, it seems that it’s similar in theory to how the latest Linux kernel runs code at randomized memory locations to prevent hardcoded attacks, but I don’t know if that’s the extent of it.