Nasm Intro - The Three Kinds of Operands & Conditional Instructions

http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/

Register Operands

In this tutorial we only care about the integer registers and the xmm registers. You should already know what the registers are, but here is a quick review. The 16 integer registers are 64 bits wide and are called:

R0  R1  R2  R3  R4  R5  R6  R7  R8  R9  R10  R11  R12  R13  R14  R15
RAX RCX RDX RBX RSP RBP RSI RDI

(Note that 8 of the registers have alternate names.) You can treat the lowest 32-bits of each register as a register itself but using these names:

R0D R1D R2D R3D R4D R5D R6D R7D R8D R9D R10D R11D R12D R13D R14D R15D
EAX ECX EDX EBX ESP EBP ESI EDI

You can treat the lowest 16-bits of each register as a register itself but using these names:

R0W R1W R2W R3W R4W R5W R6W R7W R8W R9W R10W R11W R12W R13W R14W R15W
AX  CX  DX  BX  SP  BP  SI  DI

You can treat the lowest 8-bits of each register as a register itself but using these names:

R0B R1B R2B R3B R4B R5B R6B R7B R8B R9B R10B R11B R12B R13B R14B R15B
AL  CL  DL  BL  SPL BPL SIL DIL

For historical reasons, bits 15 through 8 of R0..R3 are named:

AH  CH  DH  BH

And finally, there are 16 XMM registers, each 128 bits wide, named:

XMM0 ... XMM15

Study this picture; hopefully it helps:

Memory Operands

These are the basic forms of addressing:

• [ number ]
• [ reg ]
• [ reg + reg*scale ]      scale is 1, 2, 4, or 8 only
• [ reg + number ]
• [ reg + reg*scale + number ]

The number is called the displacement; the plain register is called thebase; the register with the scale is called theindex.

Examples:

[750]                  ; displacement only
[rbp]                  ; base register only
[rcx + rsi*4]          ; base + index * scale
[rbp + rdx]            ; scale is 1
[rbx - 8]              ; displacement is -8
[rax + rdi*8 + 500]    ; all four components
[rbx + counter]        ; uses the address of the variable 'counter' as the displacement

Immediate Operands

These can be written in many ways. Here are some examples from the official docs.

200          ; decimal
0200         ; still decimal - the leading 0 does not make it octal
0200d        ; explicitly decimal - d suffix
0d200        ; also decimal - 0d prefex
0c8h         ; hex - h suffix, but leading 0 is required because c8h looks like a var
0xc8         ; hex - the classic 0x prefix
0hc8         ; hex - for some reason NASM likes 0h
310q         ; octal - q suffix
0q310        ; octal - 0q prefix
11001000b    ; binary - b suffix
0b1100_1000  ; binary - 0b prefix, and by the way, underscores are allowed

Conditional Instructions

After an arithmetic or logic instruction, or the compare instruction, cmp, the processor sets or clears bits in itsrflags. The most interesting flags are:

• s (sign)
• z (zero)
• c (carry)
• o (overflow)

So after doing, say, an addition instruction, we can perform a jump, move, or set, based on the new flag settings. For example:

jz label	Jump to label L if the result of the operation was zero
cmovno x, y	x ← y if the last operation did not overflow
setc x	x ← 1 if the last operation had a carry, but x ← 0 otherwise (x must be a byte-size register or memory location)

The conditional instructions have three base forms: j for conditional jump,cmov for conditional move, and set for conditional set. The suffix of the instruction has one of the 30 forms:s ns z nz c nc o no p np pe po e ne l nl le nle g ng ge nge a na ae nae b nb be nbe.

; -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; A 64-bit function that returns the maximum value of its three 64-bit integer
; arguments.  The function has signature:
;
;   int64_t maxofthree(int64_t x, int64_t y, int64_t z)
;
; Note that the parameters have already been passed in rdi, rsi, and rdx.  We
; just have to return the value in rax.
; -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        global  maxofthree
        section .text
maxofthree:
        mov     rax, rdi                ; result (rax) initially holds x
        cmp     rax, rsi                ; is x less than y?
        cmovl   rax, rsi                ; if so, set result to y
        cmp     rax, rdx                ; is max(x,y) less than z?
        cmovl   rax, rdx                ; if so, set result to z
        ret                             ; the max will be in rax