Progressive Education Society's

Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

EXP NO: 01

AIM: : Write an X86/64 ALP to accept five 64 bit Hexadecimal numbers from user and store them in an
array and display the accepted numbers.

OBJECTIVES:

 To understand assembly language programming instruction set

 To understand different assembler directives with example

 To apply instruction set for implementing X86/64 bit assembly language programs

ENVIRONMENT:

 Operating System: 64-bit Open source Linux or its derivative.

 Programming Tools: Preferably using Linux equivalent or MASM/TASM/NASM/FASM.

 Text Editor: geditor

THEORY:

Introduction to Assembly Language Programming:

Each personal computer has a microprocessor that manages the computer's arithmetical, logical and

control activities. Each family of processors has its own set of instructions for handling various operations
like getting input from keyboard, displaying information on screen and performing various other jobs.
These set of instructions are called 'machine language instruction'. Processor understands only machine
language instructions which are strings of 1s and 0s. However machine language is too obscure and
complex for using in software development. So the low level assembly language is designed for a specific
family of processors that represents various instructions in symbolic code and a more understandable
form. Assembly language is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable
device specific to particular computer architecture in contrast to most high-level programming languages,
which are generally portable across multiple systems. Assembly language is converted into executable
machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler like NASM, MASM etc.
 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Advantages of Assembly Language

 An understanding of assembly language provides knowledge of:

 Interface of programs with OS, processor and BIOS;

 Representation of data in memory and other external devices;

 How processor accesses and executes instruction;

 How instructions accesses and process data;

 How a program access external devices.

Other advantages of using assembly language are:

 It requires less memory and execution time;

 It allows hardware-specific complex jobs in an easier way;

 It is suitable for time-critical jobs;

ALP Step By Step:

Installing NASM:

If you select "Development Tools" while installed Linux, you may NASM installed along with the

Linux operating system and you do not need to download and install it separately. For checking

whether you already have NASM installed, take the following steps:

 Open a Linux terminal.

 Type whereis nasm and press ENTER.

 If it is already installed then a line like, nasm: /usr/bin/nasm appears. Otherwise, you will see

justnasm:, then you need to install NASM.

To install NASM take the following steps:

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Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Open Terminal and run below commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nasm

Assembly Basic Syntax:

An assembly program can be divided into three sections:

 The data section

 The bss section

 The text section

The order in which these sections fall in your program really isn’t important, but by convention the

.data section comes first, followed by the .bss section, and then the .text section.

The .data Section

The .data section contains data definitions of initialized data items. Initialized data is data that has a

value before the program begins running. These values are part of the executable file. They are loaded

into memory when the executable file is loaded into memory for execution. You don’t have to load

them with their values, and no machine cycles are used in their creation beyond what it takes to load the

program as a whole into memory. The important thing to remember about the .data section is that the
more initialized data items you define, the larger the executable file will be, and the longer it will take to
load it from disk into memory when you run it.

The .bss Section

Not all data items need to have values before the program begins running. When you’re reading data

from a disk file, for example, you need to have a place for the data to go after it comes in from disk.
 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Data buffers like that are defined in the .bss section of your program. You set aside some number of

bytes for a buffer and give the buffer a name, but you don’t say what values are to be present in the

buffer. There’s a crucial difference between data items defined in the .data section and data items defined
in the .bss section: data items in the .data section add to the size of your executable file. Data items in
the .bss section do not.

The .text Section

The actual machine instructions that make up your program go into the .text section. Ordinarily, no data

items are defined in .text. The .text section contains symbols called labels that identify locations in the

program code for jumps and calls, but beyond your instruction mnemonics, that’s about it.

All global labels must be declared in the .text section, or the labels cannot be ‘‘seen’’ outside your

program by the Linux linker or the Linux loader. Let’s look at the labels issue a little more closely.

Labels

A label is a sort of bookmark, describing a place in the program code and giving it a name that’s easier

to remember than a naked memory address. Labels are used to indicate the places where jump instructions
should jump to, and they give names to callable assembly language procedures.

Here are the most important things to know about labels:

 Labels must begin with a letter, or else with an underscore, period, or question mark. These last

three have special meanings to the assembler, so don’t use them until you know how NASM

interprets them.

 Labels must be followed by a colon when they are defined. This is basically what tells NASM

that the identifier being defined is a label. NASM will punt if no colon is there and will not flag

an error, but the colon nails it, and prevents a mistyped instruction mnemonic from being

mistaken for a label. Use the colon!

 Labels are case sensitive. So yikes:, Yikes:, and YIKES: are three completely different labels.
 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Assembly Language Statements

Assembly language programs consist of three types of statements:

 Executable instructions or instructions

 Assembler directives or pseudo-ops

 Macros

Syntax of Assembly Language Statements

[label] mnemonic [operands] [;comment]

LIST OF INTERRRUPTS USED: NA

LIST OF ASSEMBLER DIRECTIVES USED: EQU,DB

LIST OF MACROS USED: NA

LIST OF PROCEDURES USED: NA

ALGORITHM:

INPUT: ARRAY

OUTPUT: ARRAY

STEP 1: Start.

STEP 2: Initialize the data segment.

STEP 3: Display msg1 “Accept array from user. “

STEP 4: Initialize counter to 05 and rbx as 00

STEP 5: Store element in array.

STEP 6: Move rdx by 17.

STEP 7: Add 17 to rbx.

 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

STEP 8: Decrement Counter.

STEP 9: Jump to step 5 until counter value is not zero.

STEP 9: Display msg2.

STEP 10: Initialize counter to 05 and rbx as 00

STEP 11: Display element of array.

STEP 12: Move rdx by 17.

STEP 13: Add 17 to rbx.

STEP 14: Decrement Counter.

STEP 15: Jump to step 11 until counter value is not zero.

STEP 16: Stop

FLOWCHART:
 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING
 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

PROGRAM:

section .data

msg1 db 10,13,"Enter 5 64 bit numbers"

len1 equ $-msg1

msg2 db 10,13,"Entered 5 64 bit numbers"

len2 equ $-msg2

section .bss

array resd 200

counter resb 1

section .text

global _start

_start:

;display

mov Rax,1

mov Rdi,1

mov Rsi,msg1

mov Rdx,len1

syscall

;accept

mov byte[counter],05

mov rbx,00

loop1:

mov rax,0 ; 0 for read

mov rdi,0 ; 0 for keyboard

mov rsi, array ;move pointer to start of array

add rsi,rbx
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Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

mov rdx,17

syscall

add rbx,17 ;to move counter

dec byte[counter]

JNZ loop1

;display

mov Rax,1

mov Rdi,1

mov Rsi,msg2

mov Rdx,len2

syscall

;display

mov byte[counter],05

mov rbx,00

loop2:

mov rax,1 ;1 for write

mov rdi, 1 ;1 for monitor

mov rsi, array

add rsi,rbx

mov rdx,17 ;16 bit +1 for enter

syscall

add rbx,17

dec byte[counter]

JNZ loop2

;exit system call

mov rax ,60

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Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

mov rdi,0

syscall

;output

:~$ cd ~/Desktop

Desktop$ nasm -f elf64 ass1.asm

:~/Desktop$ ld -o ass1 ass1.o

Desktop$ ./ass1

;Enter 5 64 bit numbers12

;23

;34

;45

;56

;Entered 5 64 bit numbers12

;23

;34

;45

;56

CONCLUSION:

In this practical session we learnt how to write assembly language program and Accept and display array
in assembly language.

Oral Question

1. What is macro and its definition?

 Progressive Education Society's
Modern College of Engineering, Pune-05.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

2. Explain the difference between 32bit and 64bit processors?

3. Explain steps of running an ALP program?
4. What is MASM ,TASM,NASM?
5. What is the data section,text section and bss section?