Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

System call

The user-space application is of no value if it cannot make service requests to the kernel, as it is not able to even terminate properly without asking the kernel to terminate the process it is running in. All system calls may be categorized as follows:

  • Process control: System calls that fall into this category are responsible for the creation of processes/threads and their management, as well as memory allocation/deallocation
  • File management: These system calls are responsible for file creation, deletion, and IO
  • Device management: This category contains system calls used for device administration/access
  • Maintenance: This category contains system calls for management of date, time, and files or device attributes
  • Communication: Management of communication channels and remote devices
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