I have a pointer to an array, DI.
Is it possible to go to the value pointed to by both DI and another pointer?
e.g:
mov bl,1
mov bh,10
inc [di+bl]
inc [di+bh]
And, on a related note, is there a single line opcode to swap the values of two registers? (In my case, BX and BP?)
For 16-bit programs, the only supported addressing forms are:
[BX+SI]
[BX+DI]
[BP+SI]
[BP+DI]
[SI]
[DI]
[BP]
[BX]
Each of these may include either an 8- or 16-bit constant displacement.
(Source: Intel Developer's Manual volume 2A, page 38)
The problem with the example provided is that bl and bh are eight-bit registers and cannot be used as the base pointer. However, if you set bx to the desired value then inc [di+bx] (with a suitable size specifier for the pointer) is valid.
As for swapping "the high and low bits of a register," J-16 SDiZ's suggestion of ror bx, 8 is fine for exchanging bl and bh (and IIRC, it is the optimal way to do so). However, if you want to exchange bit 0 of (say) bl with bit 7 of bl, you'll need more logic than that.
DI is not a pointer, it is an index.
You can you ROR BX, 8 to rotate a lower/higher byte of a register.
Related
I'm reading Low Level Programming by Igor Zhirkov, currently in topic 2.5 about addressing.
He shows a way to directly address memory, the example is as follows:
buffer: dq 8841, 99, 00
...
mov rax, [buffer + 8]
I know the dq creates a qword, but these values don't tell me anything about its purpose. The author says "the address in this instruction was preprocessed, as the base and the offset are constants controlled by the compiler".
Can anyone help me understand this statement?
My hardware currently has four sets of sensors that I treat as four separate serial ports with receive functionality only enabled wired to the lower 4 bits of port 0. I have attempted numerous times to retrieve the correct serial port data (by aiming the lazer direct at the sensor) without success. I then researched that for more reliability, on a standard UART, each bit is sampled at 16x a second (I found this 3/4 down the page on https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/back-to-basics-the-universal-asynchronous-receiver-transmitter-uart/).
So I ended up rolling off my own version of that but due to my timings, my count is more like 32x a second, but that's ok.
I'm going to explain what I did first so everyone understands what is going on.
code explanation
I have four consecutive address locations setup to point to values of counters for each bit. Four bits are read simultaneously from hardware and a counter for that bit goes up or down based on whether that bit is set (light detected on that group of sensors) or clear (light not detected). This loop executes frequently at about a 9600bps speed.
The second loop only executes when a value is needed. This happens once every 16 times that the last loop executes (more like at a 600bps speed). It takes the counter value of each bit as if it was a signed number and uses the MSB value as the final value of that bit. Those MSB values get crammed together to form the official bit read from the sensors.
Is this approach OK to reliably determine whether the bit value is set or cleared?
And could I somehow redo this code so the processes run faster? because each loop consumes a large number of clock cycles (32 to 40) and if I can get it down to maybe 20 clock cycles, I'd be happy.
Also, this code is executed on AT89S52 microcontroller so I'm using its extended memory addresses.
the code
;memory is preinitialized to nulls
LAZMAJ equ 0E0h ;majority counters start address (end address at 0E4h)
MAJT equ 20h ;Majority value at bit address
mov A,P0 ;get bit values from hardware
mov R1,#LAZMAJ ;go to start of pointer
;loop uses 40 clock cycles out of 192 available
countmaj:
rrc A ;get bit
jnc noincmaj
inc #R1 ;bit is set so add 1 to counter for that bit
noincmaj:
jc incmaj
dec #R1 ;bit is clear so subtract 1 from counter for that bit
incmaj:
inc R1 ;move pointer to next bit
cjne R1,#LAZMAJ+4,countmaj ;see if pointer is out of range
;it is so end loop
;loop uses about 32 clock cycles and executes when we want data
mov R1,#LAZMAJ+4 ;go to out of range position
chkmaj:
dec R1 ;decrement pointer first so we are within range
mov MAJT,#R1 ;load value to majority variable. treat it as signed
mov #R1,#0h ;clear value from memory space
mov C,MAJT.7 ;Take sign and use that as carry
rlc A ;and put it into our final variable
cjne R1,#LAZMAJ,chkmaj ;if pointer isn't in first address then keep going
;otherwise exit loop and A=value we want
I am writing simulator to microcontroller msp430. I cant understand when i should set carry bit. For example in add instruction:
1+0x7FFF setting carry bit or 1+0xFFFF?
For the ADD instruction, the carry bit is set on unsigned overflow.
You can deduce that from the examples in TI documents. In particular, the second example in the documentation of ADD instruction (page 3-22) says that carry occurs on ADD.B if the result is greater than 0xff (and for ADD and ADDA the limits are 0xffff and 0xfffff respectively - 8, 16 and 20 bits):
ADD.B #10,R5 ; Add 10 to Lowbyte of R5
JC TONI ; Carry occurred, if (R5) ≥ 246 [0Ah+0F6h]
...... ; No carry
The fact that there is a NEGATIVE bit in the msp430 status register in addition to the carry bit confirms this.
There are at least a couple of existing open-source MSP430 emulators, namely mspsim and Avrora. I suggest to use them as reference implementations.
There a two different instructions that implement <, JL (jump if less) and JLO (jump if lower).
The documentation of JL says that it
allows comparison of signed integers.
The documentation of JLO says that it
is used for the comparison of unsigned numbers.
JLO is the same as JNC, therefore, C is unsigned carry.
If I have some pointer or pointer-like values packed into an SSE or AVX register, is there any particularly efficient way to dereference them, into another such register? ("Particularly efficient" meaning "more efficient than just using memory for the values".) Is there any way to dereference them all without writing an intermediate copy of the register out to memory?
Edit for clarification: that means, assuming 32-bit pointers and SSE, to index into four arbitrary memory areas at once with the four sections of an XMM register and return four results at once to another register. Or as close to "at once" as possible. (/edit)
Edit2: thanks to PaulR's answer I guess the terminology I'm looking for is "gather", and the question therefore is "what's the best way to implement gather for systems pre-AVX2?".
I assume there isn't an instruction for this since ...well, one doesn't appear to exist as far as I can tell and anyway it doesn't seem to be what SSE is designed for at all.
("Pointer-like value" meaning something like an integer index into an array pretending to be the heap; mechanically very different but conceptually the same thing. If, say, one wanted to use 32-bit or even 16-bit values regardless of the native pointer size, to fit more values in a register.)
Two possible reason I can think of why one might want to do this:
thought it might be interesting to explore using the SSE registers for general-purpose... stuff, perhaps to have four identical 'threads' processing potentially completely unrelated/non-contiguous data, slicing through the registers "vertically" rather than "horizontally" (i.e. instead of the way they were designed to be used).
to build something like romcc if for some reason (probably not a good one), one didn't want to write anything to memory, and therefore would need more register storage.
This might sound like an XY problem, but it isn't, it's just curiosity/stupidity. I'll go looking for nails once I have my hammer.
The question is not entirely clear, but if you want to dereference vector register elements then the only instructions which might help you here are AVX2's gathered loads, e.g. _mm256_i32gather_epi32 et al. See the AVX2 section of the Intel Intrinsics Guide.
SYNOPSIS
__m256i _mm256_i32gather_epi32 (int const* base_addr, __m256i vindex, const int scale)
#include "immintrin.h"
Instruction: vpgatherdd ymm, vm32x, ymm
CPUID Flag : AVX2
DESCRIPTION
Gather 32-bit integers from memory using 32-bit indices. 32-bit elements are loaded from addresses starting at base_addr and offset by each 32-bit element in vindex (each index is scaled by the factor in scale). Gathered elements are merged into dst. scale should be 1, 2, 4 or 8.
OPERATION
FOR j := 0 to 7
i := j*32
dst[i+31:i] := MEM[base_addr + SignExtend(vindex[i+31:i])*scale]
ENDFOR
dst[MAX:256] := 0
So if I understood this correctly, your title is misleading and you really want to:
index into the concatenation of all XMM registers
with an index held in a part of an XMM register
Right?
That's hard. And a little weird, but I'm OK with that.
Assuming crazy tricks are allowed, I propose self-modifying code: (not tested)
pextrb eax, xmm?, ? // question marks are the position of the pointer
mov edx, eax
shr eax, 1
and eax, 0x38
add eax, 0xC0 // C0 makes "hack" put its result in eax
mov [hack+4], al // xmm{al}
and edx, 15
mov [hack+5], dl // byte [dl] of xmm reg
call hack
pinsrb xmm?, eax, ? // put value back somewhere
...
hack:
db 66 0F 3A 14 00 00 // pextrb ?, ? ,?
ret
As far as I know, you can't do that with full ymm registers (yet?). With some more effort, you could extend it to xmm8-xmm15. It's easily adjustable to other "pointer" sizes and other element sizes.
I have an assigment in which I have to insert two digit integers into the stack. Search a number in the stack and return in which position this number is, print all the numbers in the stack and delete a number from the stack.
Right now I'm trying to print all the numbers in the stack by going through the stack using the base pointer, but my code doesn't work.
mov di,offset bp
mov ax, [di] ;trying to move de value stored in di direction in stack to Ax
mov digito,ah
mov digito2,al
mov dl,digito
mov ah,02
int 21h
mov dl,digito2
mov ah,02
int 21h
mov ah,01
int 21h
So in this code I'm trying to print the two number digit by getting the bp into di (so later I can decrement it to go through all the stack), and the passing the number stored in that direction in Ax. I'm a newby in assembly so I don't know what I'm doing.
Thank you in advance for your time. (And sorry for my english)
Sorry for the delayed reply. First, bp doesn't really have an "offset", so you could remove that. Second, bp won't automatically point into the stack unless you have made it so (mov bp, sp).
You don't mention an OS, but int 21h identifies it as DOS... which is real mode, segmented memory model. mov ax, [di] defaults to mov ax, ds:[di]. If you've assembled this into a ".com" file, cs, ds, es, and ss are all the same. If you've assembled it into an ".exe" file, this is not so! You may want to write it as mov ax, ss:[di] to be sure. In contrast, mov ax, [bp] defaults to mov ax, ss:[bp], so you may want to use bp instead of di here. I suspect that's how you're "supposed" to do it. If you've got a ".com" file, you can forget about this part (in 32-bit code you can forget about it too, but that doesn't apply to you).
Then... your attempt to print a number isn't really going to work properly. Look for "How do I print a number?" examples for more information on that - too much to get into here...
This is too hard an assignment for a beginner, IMO (but "the instructor is always right" :) ).