Introduction to Computer

Engineering
CS/ECE 252, Spring 2017
Rahul Nayar
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Stack and
Procedures
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Why Stack?
• Running nested procedure calls in assembly language
• for each procedure calls return address stored in R7

• How do we keep track of the program execution in

nested procedure calls?

8-3
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack:
• A stack is an Abstract Data Type (ADT), commonly used in
most programming languages.
• It follows LIFO principle to access the data values
• LIFO: Last in first out
• Two basic operations:
• PUSH
• POP

8-4
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack:

8-5
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Memory layout
local variables and
2N-1 procedure context

new allocated
variables

static variables

literals

8-6
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Memory layout

8-7
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

IA32 Class Stack: Push

• push SRC

8-8
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

IA32 Class Stack: Push

• push SRC
• Fetch value from SRC
• Decrement %esp by 4 (why?)
• store value at address given by
➢%esp

8-9
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

IA32 Class Stack: Pop

• pop SRC
• Load value from address %esp
• write value to Dest
• Increment %esp by 4

8-10
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Procedure calls
• Callee must know where to find the args
• Callee must know where to find the “return address”
• Caller must know where to find the return value
• Caller and Callee run on the same CPU.. use the same
registers
• Caller might need to save the register that the Callee might use
• Callee might need to save the registers that the Caller had used

8-11
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Procedure calls
• The convention of where to leave/find things is called
the procedure call linkage
• Details vary between different systems
• What could happen if our program did not follow these
conventions?

8-12
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Procedure calls: Control flow

• Use stack to support procedure call and return
• Procedure call: call label
• Push return address on stack
• Jump to label

• call label PC=x4395

x123
esp x3213
x4395

8-13
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Procedure calls: Control flow

• Use stack to support procedure call and return
• Procedure return: ret %esp
• Pop return address from stack
• Jump to address set from the pop instruction

• set PC=x4395

x123
x3213
esp x4395

8-14
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Return values convention

• This is a convention to store return values
• this is not necessary
• Done to make the writing programs easier
• IA32 return values are stored in %eax register
• Choice is arbitrary and could have easily been a different register
• Caller must make sure to save this register value before
calling a callee that returns a value
• Callee placed return value in %eax register
• Upon return, caller finds the return value from the %eax
register

8-15
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack Frames
• Contents of a stack frame
➢Local variables
➢Function arguments
➢Return Information
➢Temporary Space

8-16
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack Frames
• Management
➢Space allocated when procedure is entered
– Set up code
➢Space deallocated upon return
– Finish code

8-17
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack frame structure

8-18
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-19
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-20
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-21
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-22
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-23
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-24
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-25
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-26
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-27
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-28
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-29
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Call Chain Example

8-30
 Copyright © The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Stack frame structure

8-31