Assembly Basics Preparation

Overview

It’s time to dive deeper under the hood and find out about what is between C and binary: assembly!

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

• Explain what registers are
• List the parts of an instruction
• Explain at a high-level how conditional control works in assembly

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

• Explain how registers are used during program execution
• Explain how pointers relate to memory form operands
• Interpret operands with constants, registers, and basic memory lookups

Resources

Read the following:

• DIS 7.0 64-bit x86 Assembly
• DIS 7.1 Assembly Basics
• DIS 7.2 Common Instructions
• DIS 7.4 Conditional Control and Loops

Checks

Submit answers the following on Moodle.

1. Given the following values in memory and registers:

   Write the value of each of the following:

   • $0x31B0
   • %rsi
   • (%rdi)
   • 0x8(%rdi)
   • (%rdi, %rsi)
   • (%rdi, %rsi, 2)

2. Assuming %rdx contains 0x32A0 and %rax contains 0x8, what will both registers contain after addq %rdx %rax?

3. Assuming rdx contains 0x6 and %rax contains 0x8, what will both registers contain after subq %rdx %rax?