Introduction to UNIX assembly programming

Hello, world!

Now we will write our program, the old classic "Hello, world" (hello.asm). You can download its source and binaries here. But before you do, let me explain several basics.

System calls

Unless a program is just implementing some math algorithms in assembly, it will deal with such things as getting input, producing output, and exiting. For this, it will need to call on OS services. In fact, programming in assembly language is quite the same in different OSes, unless OS services are touched.

There are two common ways of performing a system call in UNIX OS: through the C library (libc) wrapper, or directly.

Using or not using libc in assembly programming is more a question of taste/belief than something practical. Libc wrappers are made to protect programs from possible system call convention changes, and to provide POSIX compatible interface if the kernel lacks it for some call. However, the UNIX kernel is usually more-or-less POSIX compliant -- this means that the syntax of most libc "system calls" exactly matches the syntax of real kernel system calls (and vice versa). But the main drawback of throwing libc away is that one loses several functions that are not just syscall wrappers, like printf(), malloc() and similar.

This tutorial will show how to use direct kernel calls, since this is the fastest way to call kernel service; our code is not linked to any library, does not use ELF interpreter, it communicates with kernel directly.

Things that differ in different UNIX kernels are set of system calls and system call convention (however as they strive for POSIX compliance, there's a lot of common between them).

Note: (Former) DOS programmers might be wondering, "What is a system call?" If you ever wrote a DOS assembly program (and most IA-32 assembly programmers did), you may remember DOS services int 0x21, int 0x25, int 0x26 etc.. These are analogous to the UNIX system call. However, the actual implementation is absolutely different, and system calls are not necessarily done via some interrupt. Also, quite often DOS programmers mix OS services with BIOS services like int 0x10 or int 0x16 and are very surprised when they fail to perform them in UNIX, since these are not OS services).

Program layout

As a rule, modern IA-32 UNIXes are 32bit (*grin*), run in protected mode, have a flat memory model, and use the ELF format for binaries.

A program can be divided into sections: .text for your code (read-only), .data for your data (read-write), .bss for uninitialized data (read-write); there can actually be a few other standard sections, as well as some user-defined sections, but there's rare need to use them and they are out of our interest here. A program must have at least .text section.

Ok, now we'll dive into OS specific details.

Linux

System calls in Linux are done through int 0x80. (actually there's a kernel patch allowing system calls to be done via the syscall (sysenter) instruction on newer CPUs, but this thing is still experimental).

Linux differs from the usual UNIX calling convention, and features a "fastcall" convention for system calls (it resembles DOS). The system function number is passed in eax, and arguments are passed through registers, not the stack. There can be up to six arguments in ebx, ecx, edx, esi, edi, ebp consequently. If there are more arguments, they are simply passed though the structure as first argument. The result is returned in eax, and the stack is not touched at all.

System call function numbers are in sys/syscall.h, but actually in asm/unistd.h. Documentation on the actual system calls is in section 2 of the manual pages some documentation is in the 2nd section of manual (for example to find info on write system call, issue the command man 2 write).

There have been several attempts to write an up-to-date documentation of the Linux system calls, examine URLs in the References section below.

So, our Linux program will look like:

section    .text
    global _start          ;must be declared for linker (ld)

_start:                    ;tell linker entry point

    mov    edx,len         ;message length
    mov    ecx,msg         ;message to write
    mov    ebx,1           ;file descriptor (stdout)
    mov    eax,4           ;system call number (sys_write)
    int    0x80            ;call kernel

    mov    eax,1           ;system call number (sys_exit)
    int    0x80            ;call kernel

section    .data

msg    db    'Hello, world!',0xa ;our dear string
len    equ    $ - msg            ;length of our dear string