x86 Disassembly | Hacker News Reader

x86 Disassembly

en.wikibooks.org

102 pointsinfinity28 comments

It's funny to see this link come up on HN, because I wrote this book (or much of it) years ago as a college student. I was taking some courses on microprocessor architectures and assembly code, and was in the middle of reading Reversing by Eldad Eilam (which had just come out at the time). I had a mantra back then that the best way to learn a subject was to try and teach it, so I wrote this and several other wikibooks as sort of a study aide for my classes. This also explains why the material appears to cover barely a semester's worth of material and why my name ("Whiteknight") doesn't appear in the edit history after graduation in 2008.

Despite the relatively thin and incomplete coverage of the material, I've heard from several people over the years who appreciated the work as a nice introduction to the topic and even once received a job offer because of it (which didn't work out, for a variety of reasons). All things considered, if I had to change anything it would be the title to make it a little more focused. It's not really a book about disassembly so much as it is an introduction to what high-level language features look like when translated into non-optimized x86 assembly code. Find me a short, catchy title that accurately describes that, and you win some kind of prize.

I doubt I'll ever get back to this book either. I haven't worked with this material at all since school, and don't feel like I have up-to-date knowledge of the subject. Unless somebody else wants to jump in and fill it out, it will probably stay the way you see it now.

I'm glad to see that this book is still around and I'm glad that people are benefiting from it in some small way. I know it doesn't cover nearly what would be needed for a real book on the subject (I do still recommend Eilam's Reversing for book-o-philes) but I think it should be a decent stepping stone to pique interest and get people moving on towards more in-depth treatments.

Write a disassembler at least once. It's much easier than you think it is (even with X86) --- it's essentially a file format parser --- and very illuminating.

As someone looking more into x86_64 assembly, instruction encoding, syscalls and ELF files recently, not only the lack of good starting points but also the amount of work required to get into it is a pity.

I'm currently using [0] as a helping hand among other resources which is quite good; my maybe not-so-interesting results are at [1].

For example, to get a good overview of instruction encoding you have to 0/ read through and ditch horrible blog posts 1/ find the correct Intel manual 2/ search and read through thousands of PDF pages until you find something interesting 3/ understand the environment and facts that are either implicitly given or in the documents but not easy to find.

For the handful lines of actual code I wrote yesterday [1] I still have around 25 tabs open. Complexity and no end in sight.

Do you have any recommendations and hints as where to start with this in the year 2015?

[0] http://0xax.blogspot.se/p/assembly-x8664-programming-for-lin...

[1] https://github.com/daniel-j-h/x86-64-asm

Seconding this. I've implemented a part of x86 instruction encoding and you either find resources:

* comprehensible, but far from complete (some blogs)

* complete, but hard to understand and requiring some implicit knowledge (Intel manual or [1])

Rather than disassembler I recommend writing some simple JIT compiler, with [2] as a starting point. You skip some problems this way.

[1] http://ref.x86asm.net/ this seems pretty cool as a reference, but I can't wrap my head around it

[2] http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/11/05/how-to-jit-an-introd...

I use that first reference extensively.

But you have to understand that it's just a reference, it doesn't give you the complete picture. It just shows you the important stuff when you already know where to look.

I've written partial disassemblers/assemblers. And that site has been a huge help to me.

My 2 cents:

Start with being able to decode the mov instruction, with all the different possible memory encodings. Once you understand how you parse the memory/addressing scheme of x86 it's suddenly a whole lot easier. And I agree that writing an assembler to start is probably easier, to write a disassembler it has to be complete, but an assembler doesn't have to support all instructions to work.

I've written a pretty complete assembler a few years back. My advice, if you want to truly learn encoding, you need to write an assembler. The reason being, as you're trying to figure out if your assembler is generating the correct instructions you're going to be looking at it in hexdump format for days or weeks. Pretty soon you're going to notice prefixes, and will be able to visually decode instructions just by looking at them in hex bytes. It's really not that hard after a little practice, and knowing ModRM.

I will emphasize, the Intel manual is pretty much all I used. Along with NASM. I looked at NASM source a lot to figure out what they did, but also used NASM to compare generated instructions. The Intel manual is critical. I would go straight to the authoritative source. It's not hard to follow once you understand the terminology and format a bit. Just keep reading it.

edit: Oh, and, the most important thing to ever know: Intel is little-endian! I cannot stress understanding the importance of this enough. Even when you know this, it's very easy to forget it when looking at code.

And then you realize you could actually take it a step further and before you know it you are hunting for documentation on the amount of cycles each intruction and data access takes and other obscure clocking info, nevermind there are a thousand and one emulators already in existence that are several orders of magnitude better than the half assed attempt you are trying to come up with. Fun times :)

Cycle accurate emulation of modern x86 would be impossible. Intel simply won't release the secret sauce on branch prediction, cache prediction, out of order execution, internal instruction engine, etc.

On the other hand, the absence of such information means that games don't depend on it.

That's such a huge problem with exploratory programming: the demotivating effect of knowing that there are better versions of almost anything you're building, because other people have been working on the problem for longer.

You have to get over it and keep going anyways or you'll never become one of those people yourself! (Or even be able to make an informed decision about whether you want to).

Not coincidentally: part of the point of the company we just started. :)

I'm currently writing one in JavaScript of all languages, just to prove it works. also, it's true multi-platform ;)

You may find this disassembler port to Java I did useful. [JayD](http://github.com/ianopolous/JayD) it's more accurate than both objdump and its source, udis86, after I used it as the base for the [JPC emulator](http://github.com/ianopolous/JPC).

It's also much easier to decode x86 instructions when you look at them in octal instead of the hexadecimal that most tables use, since both the main opcode map and ModRM/SIB are organised in a 2-3-3 layout:

http://reocities.com/SiliconValley/heights/7052/opcode.txt

The 8080/8085/Z80 instruction sets also look much better in octal:

http://www.z80.info/decoding.htm

I had no idea! This is very cool.

This is seriously exploding my brain. Thank you for posting it.

And that's really interesting (and puzzling).

You are clearly intelligent, well educated, etc. and blah blah blah.

Yet, you somehow missed that.

If you can explain why, it would probably be something we could all learn from. At the very least, it would be interesting.

Is it because you learned x86 before you learned octal and never really reexamined the encoding?

(The PDP-11 machine code also looks best in octal, btw.)

This comment validates all the time I have "wasted" reading HN over the years.

It does not suprise me that something so simple would be so well overlooked (or, at least, "forgotten"). I wonder if I ever would have figured this out from my own readings and experiments. Doubtful.

Great tip!

I figured it out before/without exposure to that document, but I attribute it to the fact that I started teaching myself at a time when octal was more common amongst mini and micro-computers; most programmers these days barely know any number base other than decimal, and of those who do, binary and hexadecimal are likely far more familiar to them than octal. The official Intel/AMD manuals make no reference to octal either, using only binary and hex.

As an aside, ARM opcodes are (mostly) hex-structured with 4-bit fields, while MIPS, POWER, and SPARC are not amenable to any standard number base except binary (5- and 6-bit fields.)

This book is missing very actively developed reverse engineering framework radare2 [1], which is supporting not only x86/x86_64 but also arm, mips, ppc, avr, arc, 8051, TI tms320c55x family and even more!

[1] http://rada.re/

The title of the book is "X86 Disassembly". It was only ever intended to cover x86. x86_64, mips, ppc, etc are all expressly out of scope.

And here is a JS x86 disassembler: https://github.com/indutny/disasm . It is incomplete, but shows how the basics works.

Why does `push eax` perform "much faster" than the following?

  sub esp, 4
  mov DWORD PTR SS:[esp], eax

A brief skim of Intel's "Software Developer’s Manual" (particularly ch. 6 on stacks), didn't seem to find an answer.

While hitting the ALU just for `sub` might be an extra step, doesn't hitting RAM make that a drop in the bucket? (`sub` may account for less than 1%?) Or is there some caching going on, so RAM may be updated in the background?

(I'm not an assembly programmer; very ignorant of what's happening.)

It is quite hard to envision a scenario where the current stack frame wasn't in any cache level.

Ah ok, it has something to do with caching. So the cost of `sub` can be noticeable. Thanks!

I don't know exactly why, but I have some theories. First, the two instructions you list there aren't parallelizable, because you have a write to ESP and then a read from it, so the first instruction needs to complete first (or, get far enough in the pipeline for the partial result to be usable). This is almost certainly going to cause some stalls.

Beyond that, the best explanations I've seen are that the push/pop instructions are "optimized" in some way. I don't know if that means they are more optimized than just making the inc/read pair on the ESP atomic so it doesn't stall or if there is more to it.

It's a lot smaller (1 byte vs 6), which means less space spent in the cache and decoder, reducing cache misses and decode bandwidth. The x86 also has a dedicated "stack engine" since the Pentium M (but not suprisingly, absent in NetBurst), which contains an adder and copy of the stack pointer to handle push/pop operations. This is faster than using the general-purpose ALUs and memory read/write ports, and also frees those up for use by other non-stack instructions. On the other hand, it means reading/writing the stack pointer explicitly between implicit stack operations incurs a little extra latency to get the values between the stack engine and "real" ESP register synchronised.

Memory reads/writes do take a few more cycles to complete, but since this is a write, the CPU can continue on with other non-dependent instructions following it. All the above information assumes a CPU based on P6 and its successors (Core, Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, etc.); NetBurst and Atom are very different.

Linus also has some interesting things to say about using the dedicated stack instructions: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/pop_instruction_speed.html

Somewhat amusingly, GCC was well known to generate the explicit sub/mov instructions by default, while most other x86 C compilers I knew of, including MSVC and ICC, would always use push.

Thanks to you and awhitworth! Very interesting stuff, kept me reading. (And soon searching to understand some of the ideas. And thinking of Linus's puzzle about `call` being faster than a `push` before a jump. Seems to be one of those cases where higher-level abstractions can be optimized better than lower-level ones. I suppose because lower-level ones are too general-purpose, while higher-level ones are constrained.)

It's about dependency chains (and fewer bytes, easier decoding, and fewer µops). The OOO core can do more if it has more (but shorter) dependency chains to work with.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf

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