Setting Up a Development Environment | Mastering Assembly Programming

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Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko

3.1 (8)

Buy this Book

Mastering Assembly Programming

3.1 (8)

By: Alexey Lyashko

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Intel Architecture

Processor registers

Summary

Setting Up a Development Environment

Microsoft Macro Assembler

GNU Assembler (GAS)

Flat Assembler

Summary

Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)

Assembly source template

Data types and their definitions

A debugger

The instruction set summary

Summary

Memory Addressing Modes

Addressing code

Addressing data

Far pointers

Summary

Parallel Data Processing

SSE

Biorhythm calculator

AVX-512

Summary

Macro Instructions

What are macro instructions?

An introduction to calling conventions

A note on Flat Assembler's macro capabilities

Macro instructions in MASM and GAS

Other assembler directives (FASM Specific)

Summary

Data Structures

Arrays

Structures

Linked lists

Trees

Sparse matrices

Graphs

Summary

Mixing Modules Written in Assembly and Those Written in High-Level Languages

Crypto Core

Interfacing with C/C++

Assembly and managed code

Summary

Operating System Interface

The rings

System call

Using libraries

Summary

Patching Legacy Code

The executable

The issue

PE files

ELF executables

Summary

Oh, Almost Forgot

Protecting the code

A bit of kernel space

Summary

By now, we have reviewed three different assemblers: Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM), this is an integral part of Visual Studio, GNU Assembler (GAS), this is the default backend for GNU Compilers Collection (GCC), Flat Assembler (FASM), this is a standalone, portable, flexible, and powerful assembler.

Although we will be using FASM, we may still refer to the other two from time to time, when the need arises (and it will).

Having an installed and working assembler, we are ready to proceed to Chapter 3, Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), and start working with the Assembly language itself. There is a long road ahead, and we have not made the first step yet. In Chapter 3, Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), we will go through the instruction set architecture of Intel processors, and you will learn how to write simple programs for both Windows and Linux, 32 and...