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Assembly - Macros

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11 views3 pages

Assembly - Macros

Uploaded by

michal hana
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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6/15/24, 3:59 PM Assembly - Macros

Assembly - Macros
Writing a macro is another way of ensuring modular programming in assembly
language.

A macro is a sequence of instructions, assigned by a name and could be used


anywhere in the program.
In NASM, macros are defined with %macro and %endmacro directives.
The macro begins with the %macro directive and ends with the %endmacro
directive.

The Syntax for macro definition −

%macro macro_name number_of_params


<macro body>
%endmacro

Where, number_of_params specifies the number parameters, macro_name specifies


the name of the macro.

The macro is invoked by using the macro name along with the necessary
parameters. When you need to use some sequence of instructions many times in a
program, you can put those instructions in a macro and use it instead of writing the
instructions all the time.

For example, a very common need for programs is to write a string of characters in
the screen. For displaying a string of characters, you need the following sequence of
instructions −

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

In the above example of displaying a character string, the registers EAX, EBX, ECX
and EDX have been used by the INT 80H function call. So, each time you need to
display on screen, you need to save these registers on the stack, invoke INT 80H

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6/15/24, 3:59 PM Assembly - Macros

and then restore the original value of the registers from the stack. So, it could be
useful to write two macros for saving and restoring data.

We have observed that, some instructions like IMUL, IDIV, INT, etc., need some of
the information to be stored in some particular registers and even return values in
some specific register(s). If the program was already using those registers for
keeping important data, then the existing data from these registers should be saved
in the stack and restored after the instruction is executed.

Example
Following example shows defining and using macros −

; A macro with two parameters Live Demo


; Implements the write system call
%macro write_string 2
mov eax, 4
mov ebx, 1
mov ecx, %1
mov edx, %2
int 80h
%endmacro

section .text
global _start ;must be declared for using gcc

_start: ;tell linker entry point


write_string msg1, len1
write_string msg2, len2
write_string msg3, len3

mov eax,1 ;system call number (sys_exit)


int 0x80 ;call kernel

section .data
msg1 db 'Hello, programmers!',0xA,0xD
len1 equ $ - msg1

msg2 db 'Welcome to the world of,', 0xA,0xD


len2 equ $- msg2

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6/15/24, 3:59 PM Assembly - Macros

msg3 db 'Linux assembly programming! '


len3 equ $- msg3

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

Hello, programmers!
Welcome to the world of,
Linux assembly programming!

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