ARM Assembly language tutorial

Create a file called first.s and write the contents shown above. Save it.

To assemble the file type the following command (write what comes after $ ).

This will create a first.o. Now link this file to get an executable.

If everything goes as expected you will get a first file. This is your program. Run it.

It should do nothing. Yes, it is a bit disappointing, but it actually does something. Get its error code this time.

Great! That error code of 2 is not by chance, it is due to that #2 in the assembler code.

Since running the assembler and the linker soon becomes boring, I’d recommend you using the following Makefile file instead or a similar one.

Well, what happened?

We cheated a bit just to make things a bit easier. We wrote a C main function in assembler which only does return 2;. This way our program is easier since the C runtime handled initialization and termination of the program for us. I will use this approach all the time.

Let’s review every line of our minimal assembler file.

These are comments. Comments are enclosed in /* and */. Use them to document your assembler as they are ignored. As usually, do not nest /* and */ inside /* because it does not work.

This is a directive for GNU Assembler. A directive tells GNU Assembler to do something special. They start with a dot (.) followed by the name of the directive and some arguments. In this case we are saying that main is a global name. This is needed because the C runtime will call main. If it is not global, it will not be callable by the C runtime and the linking phase will fail.

Another GNU assembler directive. Here we state that main is a function. This is important because an assembler program usually contains instructions (i.e. code) but may also contain data. We need to explicitly state that main actually refers to a function, because it is code.