# The Netwide Assembler: NASM

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## Chapter 8: Writing 32-bit Code (Unix, Win32, DJGPP)

This chapter attempts to cover some of the common issues involved when writing 32-bit code, to run under Win32 or Unix, or to be linked with C code generated by a Unix-style C compiler such as DJGPP. It covers how to write assembly code to interface with 32-bit C routines, and how to write position-independent code for shared libraries.

Almost all 32-bit code, and in particular all code running under Win32, DJGPP or any of the PC Unix variants, runs in flat memory model. This means that the segment registers and paging have already been set up to give you the same 32-bit 4Gb address space no matter what segment you work relative to, and that you should ignore all segment registers completely. When writing flat-model application code, you never need to use a segment override or modify any segment register, and the code-section addresses you pass to `CALL` and `JMP` live in the same address space as the data-section addresses you access your variables by and the stack-section addresses you access local variables and procedure parameters by. Every address is 32 bits long and contains only an offset part.

### 8.1 Interfacing to 32-bit C Programs

A lot of the discussion in section 7.4, about interfacing to 16-bit C programs, still applies when working in 32 bits. The absence of memory models or segmentation worries simplifies things a lot.

#### 8.1.1 External Symbol Names

Most 32-bit C compilers share the convention used by 16-bit compilers, that the names of all global symbols (functions or data) they define are formed by prefixing an underscore to the name as it appears in the C program. However, not all of them do: the ELF specification states that C symbols do not have a leading underscore on their assembly-language names.

The older Linux `a.out` C compiler, all Win32 compilers, DJGPP, and NetBSD and FreeBSD, all use the leading underscore; for these compilers, the macros `cextern` and `cglobal`, as given in section 7.4.1, will still work. For ELF, though, the leading underscore should not be used.

#### 8.1.2 Function Definitions and Function Calls

The C calling conventionThe C calling convention in 32-bit programs is as follows. In the following description, the words caller and callee are used to denote the function doing the calling and the function which gets called.

- The caller pushes the function's parameters on the stack, one after another, in reverse order (right to left, so that the first argument specified to the function is pushed last).
- The caller then executes a near `CALL` instruction to pass control to the callee.
- The callee receives control, and typically (although this is not actually necessary, in functions which do not need to access their parameters) starts by saving the value of `ESP` in `EBP` so as to be able to use `EBP` as a base pointer to find its parameters on the stack. However, the caller was probably doing this too, so part of the calling convention states that `EBP` must be preserved by any C function. Hence the callee, if it is going to set up `EBP` as a frame pointer, must push the previous value first.
- The callee may then access its parameters relative to `EBP`. The doubleword at `[EBP]` holds the previous value of `EBP` as it was pushed; the next doubleword, at `[EBP+4]`, holds the return address, pushed implicitly by `CALL`. The parameters start after that, at `[EBP+8]`. The leftmost parameter of the function, since it was pushed last, is accessible at this offset from `EBP`; the others follow, at successively greater offsets. Thus, in a function such as `printf` which takes a variable number of parameters, the pushing of the parameters in reverse order means that the function knows where to find its first parameter, which tells it the number and type of the remaining ones.
- The callee may also wish to decrease `ESP` further, so as to allocate space on the stack for local variables, which will then be accessible at negative offsets from `EBP`.
- The callee, if it wishes to return a value to the caller, should leave the value in `AL`, `AX` or `EAX` depending on the size of the value. Floating-point results are typically returned in `ST0`.
- Once the callee has finished processing, it restores `ESP` from `EBP` if it had allocated local stack space, then pops the previous value of `EBP`, and returns via `RET` (equivalently, `RETN`).
- When the caller regains control from the callee, the function parameters are still on the stack, so it typically adds an immediate constant to `ESP` to remove them (instead of executing a number of slow `POP` instructions). Thus, if a function is accidentally called with the wrong number of parameters due to a prototype mismatch, the stack will still be returned to a sensible state since the caller, which knows how many parameters it pushed, does the removing.

There is an alternative calling convention used by Win32 programs for Windows API calls, and also for functions called by the Windows API such as window procedures: they follow what Microsoft calls the `__stdcall` convention. This is slightly closer to the Pascal convention, in that the callee clears the stack by passing a parameter to the `RET` instruction. However, the parameters are still pushed in right-to-left order.

Thus, you would define a function in C style in the following way:

              global _myfunc
    _myfunc:  push ebp
              mov ebp,esp
              sub esp,0x40           ; 64 bytes of local stack space
              mov ebx,[ebp+8]        ; first parameter to function
              ; some more code
              leave                  ; mov esp,ebp / pop ebp
              ret

At the other end of the process, to call a C function from your assembly code, you would do something like this:

              extern _printf
              ; and then, further down...
              push dword [myint]     ; one of my integer variables
              push dword mystring    ; pointer into my data segment
              call _printf
              add esp,byte 8         ; `byte' saves space
              ; then those data items...
              segment _DATA
    myint     dd 1234
    mystring  db 'This number -> %d <- should be 1234',10,0

This piece of code is the assembly equivalent of the C code

        int myint = 1234;
        printf("This number -> %d <- should be 1234\n", myint);

#### 8.1.3 Accessing Data Items

To get at the contents of C variables, or to declare variables which C can access, you need only declare the names as `GLOBAL` or `EXTERN`. (Again, the names require leading underscores, as stated in section 8.1.1.) Thus, a C variable declared as `int i` can be accessed from assembler as

              extern _i
              mov eax,[_i]

And to declare your own integer variable which C programs can access as `extern int j`, you do this (making sure you are assembling in the `_DATA` segment, if necessary):

              global _j
    _j        dd 0

To access a C array, you need to know the size of the components of the array. For example, `int` variables are four bytes long, so if a C program declares an array as `int a[10]`, you can access `a[3]` by coding `mov ax,[_a+12]`. (The byte offset 12 is obtained by multiplying the desired array index, 3, by the size of the array element, 4.) The sizes of the C base types in 32-bit compilers are: 1 for `char`, 2 for `short`, 4 for `int`, `long` and `float`, and 8 for `double`. Pointers, being 32-bit addresses, are also 4 bytes long.

To access a C data structure, you need to know the offset from the base of the structure to the field you are interested in. You can either do this by converting the C structure definition into a NASM structure definition (using `STRUC`), or by calculating the one offset and using just that.

To do either of these, you should read your C compiler's manual to find out how it organises data structures. NASM gives no special alignment to structure members in its own `STRUC` macro, so you have to specify alignment yourself if the C compiler generates it. Typically, you might find that a structure like

    struct {
        char c;
        int i;
    } foo;

might be eight bytes long rather than five, since the `int` field would be aligned to a four-byte boundary. However, this sort of feature is sometimes a configurable option in the C compiler, either using command-line options or `#pragma` lines, so you have to find out how your own compiler does it.

#### 8.1.4 `c32.mac`: Helper Macros for the 32-bit C Interface

Included in the NASM archives, in the `misc` directory, is a file `c32.mac` of macros. It defines three macros: `proc`, `arg` and `endproc`. These are intended to be used for C-style procedure definitions, and they automate a lot of the work involved in keeping track of the calling convention.

An example of an assembly function using the macro set is given here:

              proc _proc32
    %$i       arg
    %$j       arg
              mov eax,[ebp + %$i]
              mov ebx,[ebp + %$j]
              add eax,[ebx]
              endproc

This defines `_proc32` to be a procedure taking two arguments, the first (`i`) an integer and the second (`j`) a pointer to an integer. It returns `i + *j`.

Note that the `arg` macro has an `EQU` as the first line of its expansion, and since the label before the macro call gets prepended to the first line of the expanded macro, the `EQU` works, defining `%$i` to be an offset from `BP`. A context-local variable is used, local to the context pushed by the `proc` macro and popped by the `endproc` macro, so that the same argument name can be used in later procedures. Of course, you don't have to do that.

`arg` can take an optional parameter, giving the size of the argument. If no size is given, 4 is assumed, since it is likely that many function parameters will be of type `int` or pointers.

### 8.2 Writing NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD and Linux/ELF Shared Libraries

ELF replaced the older `a.out` object file format under Linux because it contains support for position-independent code (PIC), which makes writing shared libraries much easier. NASM supports the ELF position-independent code features, so you can write Linux ELF shared libraries in NASM.

NetBSD, and its close cousins FreeBSD and OpenBSD, take a different approach by hacking PIC support into the `a.out` format. NASM supports this as the `aoutb` output format, so you can write BSD shared libraries in NASM too.

The operating system loads a PIC shared library by memory-mapping the library file at an arbitrarily chosen point in the address space of the running process. The contents of the library's code section must therefore not depend on where it is loaded in memory.

Therefore, you cannot get at your variables by writing code like this:

              mov eax,[myvar]        ; WRONG

Instead, the linker provides an area of memory called the global offset table, or GOT; the GOT is situated at a constant distance from your library's code, so if you can find out where your library is loaded (which is typically done using a `CALL` and `POP` combination), you can obtain the address of the GOT, and you can then load the addresses of your variables out of linker-generated entries in the GOT.

The data section of a PIC shared library does not have these restrictions: since the data section is writable, it has to be copied into memory anyway rather than just paged in from the library file, so as long as it's being copied it can be relocated too. So you can put ordinary types of relocation in the data section without too much worry (but see section 8.2.4 for a caveat).

#### 8.2.1 Obtaining the Address of the GOT

Each code module in your shared library should define the GOT as an external symbol:

              extern _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_   ; in ELF
              extern __GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_  ; in BSD a.out

At the beginning of any function in your shared library which plans to access your data or BSS sections, you must first calculate the address of the GOT. This is typically done by writing the function in this form:

    func:     push ebp
              mov ebp,esp
              push ebx
              call .get_GOT
    .get_GOT: pop ebx
              add ebx,_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_+$$-.get_GOT wrt ..gotpc
              ; the function body comes here
              mov ebx,[ebp-4]
              mov esp,ebp
              pop ebp
              ret

(For BSD, again, the symbol `_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE` requires a second leading underscore.)

The first two lines of this function are simply the standard C prologue to set up a stack frame, and the last three lines are standard C function epilogue. The third line, and the fourth to last line, save and restore the `EBX` register, because PIC shared libraries use this register to store the address of the GOT.

The interesting bit is the `CALL` instruction and the following two lines. The `CALL` and `POP` combination obtains the address of the label `.get_GOT`, without having to know in advance where the program was loaded (since the `CALL` instruction is encoded relative to the current position). The `ADD` instruction makes use of one of the special PIC relocation types: GOTPC relocation. With the `WRT ..gotpc` qualifier specified, the symbol referenced (here `_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_`, the special symbol assigned to the GOT) is given as an offset from the beginning of the section. (Actually, ELF encodes it as the offset from the operand field of the `ADD` instruction, but NASM simplifies this deliberately, so you do things the same way for both ELF and BSD.) So the instruction then adds the beginning of the section, to get the real address of the GOT, and subtracts the value of `.get_GOT` which it knows is in `EBX`. Therefore, by the time that instruction has finished, `EBX` contains the address of the GOT.

If you didn't follow that, don't worry: it's never necessary to obtain the address of the GOT by any other means, so you can put those three instructions into a macro and safely ignore them:

    %macro get_GOT 0
              call %%getgot
    %%getgot: pop ebx
              add ebx,_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_+$$-%%getgot wrt ..gotpc
    %endmacro

#### 8.2.2 Finding Your Local Data Items

Having got the GOT, you can then use it to obtain the addresses of your data items. Most variables will reside in the sections you have declared; they can be accessed using the `..gotoff` special `WRT` type. The way this works is like this:

              lea eax,[ebx+myvar wrt ..gotoff]

The expression `myvar wrt ..gotoff` is calculated, when the shared library is linked, to be the offset to the local variable `myvar` from the beginning of the GOT. Therefore, adding it to `EBX` as above will place the real address of `myvar` in `EAX`.

If you declare variables as `GLOBAL` without specifying a size for them, they are shared between code modules in the library, but do not get exported from the library to the program that loaded it. They will still be in your ordinary data and BSS sections, so you can access them in the same way as local variables, using the above `..gotoff` mechanism.

Note that due to a peculiarity of the way BSD `a.out` format handles this relocation type, there must be at least one non-local symbol in the same section as the address you're trying to access.

#### 8.2.3 Finding External and Common Data Items

If your library needs to get at an external variable (external to the library, not just to one of the modules within it), you must use the `..got` type to get at it. The `..got` type, instead of giving you the offset from the GOT base to the variable, gives you the offset from the GOT base to a GOT entry containing the address of the variable. The linker will set up this GOT entry when it builds the library, and the dynamic linker will place the correct address in it at load time. So to obtain the address of an external variable `extvar` in `EAX`, you would code

              mov eax,[ebx+extvar wrt ..got]

This loads the address of `extvar` out of an entry in the GOT. The linker, when it builds the shared library, collects together every relocation of type `..got`, and builds the GOT so as to ensure it has every necessary entry present.

Common variables must also be accessed in this way.

#### 8.2.4 Exporting Symbols to the Library User

If you want to export symbols to the user of the library, you have to declare whether they are functions or data, and if they are data, you have to give the size of the data item. This is because the dynamic linker has to build procedure linkage table entries for any exported functions, and also moves exported data items away from the library's data section in which they were declared.

So to export a function to users of the library, you must use

              global func:function   ; declare it as a function
    func:     push ebp
              ; etc.

And to export a data item such as an array, you would have to code

              global array:data array.end-array ; give the size too
    array:    resd 128
    .end:

Be careful: If you export a variable to the library user, by declaring it as `GLOBAL` and supplying a size, the variable will end up living in the data section of the main program, rather than in your library's data section, where you declared it. So you will have to access your own global variable with the `..got` mechanism rather than `..gotoff`, as if it were external (which, effectively, it has become).

Equally, if you need to store the address of an exported global in one of your data sections, you can't do it by means of the standard sort of code:

    dataptr:  dd global_data_item    ; WRONG

NASM will interpret this code as an ordinary relocation, in which `global_data_item` is merely an offset from the beginning of the `.data` section (or whatever); so this reference will end up pointing at your data section instead of at the exported global which resides elsewhere.

Instead of the above code, then, you must write

    dataptr:  dd global_data_item wrt ..sym

which makes use of the special `WRT` type `..sym` to instruct NASM to search the symbol table for a particular symbol at that address, rather than just relocating by section base.

Either method will work for functions: referring to one of your functions by means of

    funcptr:  dd my_function

will give the user the address of the code you wrote, whereas

    funcptr:  dd my_function wrt ..sym

will give the address of the procedure linkage table for the function, which is where the calling program will believe the function lives. Either address is a valid way to call the function.

#### 8.2.5 Calling Procedures Outside the Library

Calling procedures outside your shared library has to be done by means of a procedure linkage table, or PLT. The PLT is placed at a known offset from where the library is loaded, so the library code can make calls to the PLT in a position-independent way. Within the PLT there is code to jump to offsets contained in the GOT, so function calls to other shared libraries or to routines in the main program can be transparently passed off to their real destinations.

To call an external routine, you must use another special PIC relocation type, `WRT ..plt`. This is much easier than the GOT-based ones: you simply replace calls such as `CALL printf` with the PLT-relative version `CALL printf WRT ..plt`.

#### 8.2.6 Generating the Library File

Having written some code modules and assembled them to `.o` files, you then generate your shared library with a command such as

    ld -shared -o library.so module1.o module2.o       # for ELF
    ld -Bshareable -o library.so module1.o module2.o   # for BSD

For ELF, if your shared library is going to reside in system directories such as `/usr/lib` or `/lib`, it is usually worth using the `-soname` flag to the linker, to store the final library file name, with a version number, into the library:

    ld -shared -soname library.so.1 -o library.so.1.2 *.o

You would then copy `library.so.1.2` into the library directory, and create `library.so.1` as a symbolic link to it.

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