What is the meaning of 'mov %reg8, (%reg32)' (not movb)?

0

the test platform is x86-32bit.

I know that on x86-32bit, we have two opcodes movsbl and movzbl which has the following semantics:

%eax = 0x12345678
%edx = 0xAAAABBBB
MOVB %dh, %al         %eax = 0x123456BB
MOVSBL %dh, %eax      %eax = 0xFFFFFFBB
MOVZBL %dh, %eax      %eax = 0x000000BB

The above example is from here.

Then I am kind of confused with the semantics of the following instruction:

mov %dl, 0x2c(%esp)

What is the exact meaning of the above mov, is it equal to movsbl ? or equal to movzbl? Or neither?

assembly
x86
att
opcode
asked on Stack Overflow Sep 14, 2015 by lllllllllllll • edited May 23, 2017 by Community

1 Answer

1

If no operand sizes are explicitly provided, most assemblers will calculate the type of operation from the operand sizes. Therefore, in this case, mov %dl, 0x2c(%esp) is equivalent to movb %dl, 0x2c(%esp), a simple 1 byte move, deducing the b suffix from the one-byte register, dl.

The reason for the 32 bit register: this stores the address of the memory location; no mismatch in operand sizes results (since a memory location can be interpreted as being any size).

answered on Stack Overflow Sep 14, 2015 by owacoder • edited Sep 15, 2015 by owacoder

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