What are the x86-64 instructions for floating-point comparisons like the cmpq for quard-word integer comparison? The SSE3 extenstions provide two instructions for comparing floating values: Instruction Based on Description ucomiss S2, S1 S1 – S2 Compare single precision ucomisd S2, S1 S1 – S2 Compare double precision As with cmpq, they follow the GAS convention…
What’s the error code conventions on Linux and Windows? Linux and Windows use 0 to indicate that the operation is successful and an integer that is larger than 0 for some errors. Linux System Error Codes On Linux, the system error codes is defined in 2 headers which you can find on your own box:…
How to get the native assembly code (e.g. x86-64 asm) for OCaml code generated by the native ocamlopt compiler? To get the assembly code for an OCaml program, add these parameters to ocamlopt: -S -inline 20 -nodynlink An example is as follows. The OCaml program: $ cat not.ml let not x = ((x – 1)…
The encoding of x86 and x86-64 instructions is well documented in Intel or AMD’s manuals. However, they are not quite easy for beginners to start with to learn encoding of the x86-64 instructions. In this post, I will give a list of useful manuals for understanding and studying the x86-64 instruction encoding, a brief introduction…
It is quite common to measure the time in programs using APIs like clock() and gettimeofday(). We may also want to measure the time “accurately” for certain purposes, such as measuring a small piece of code’s execution time for performance analysis, or measuring the time in time-sensitive game software. It is hard to measure the…
One cool feature of gcc is that it can inline assembly into C code. With inline assembly, the programmer can precisely control the execution of the processor, such as forcing variables to use registers, getting special processor state efficiently, and writing critical efficient code in assembly by hand. I compile a list of tutorials from…