Ytukyg

I'm trying to learn assembly (so bear with me) and I'm getting a compile error on this line:

mov byte [t_last], [t_cur]

The error is

error: invalid combination of opcode and operands

I suspect that the cause of this error is simply that its not possible for a mov instruction to move between two memory addresses, but half an hour of googling and I haven't been able to confirm this - is this the case?

Also, assuming I'm right that means I need to use a register as an intermediate point for copying memory:

mov cl, [t_cur]

mov [t_last], cl

Whats the recommended register to use (or should I use the stack instead)?

Your suspicion is correct, you can't move from memory to memory.

Any general-purpose register will do. Remember to PUSH the register if you are not sure what's inside it and to restore it back once done.

It's really simple in 16 bit, just do the following:

     push     di

     push     si

     push     cx

     mov      cx,(number of bytes to move)

     lea      di,(destination address)

     lea      si,(source address)

     rep      movsb

     pop      cx

     pop      si

     pop      di

Note: the pushes & pops are neceessary if you need to save the contents of the registers.

There's also a MOVS command from moving data from memory to memory:

MOV SI, OFFSET variable1

MOV DI, OFFSET variable2

MOVS

That's correct, x86 machine code can't encode an instruction with two explicit memory operands (arbitrary addresses specified in )

• Why isn't movl from memory to memory allowed?


• What x86 instructions take two (or more) memory operands?

Whats the recommended register

Any register you don't need to save/restore.

In all the mainstream 32-bit and 64-bit calling conventions, EAX, ECX, and EDX are call-clobbered, so AL, CL, and DL are good choices. In 64-bit mode, SIL, DIL, r8b, r9b and so on are also find choices, but require a REX prefix in the machine code so there's a minor code-size reason to avoid them.

Generally avoid writing AH, BH, CH, or DH for performance reasons, unless you've read and understood the following links and any false dependencies or partial-register merging stalls aren't going to be a problem or happen at all in your code.

• Why doesn't GCC use partial registers?


• How exactly do partial registers on Haswell/Skylake perform? Writing AL seems to have a false dependency on RAX, and AH is inconsistent

(or should I use the stack instead)?

First of all, you can't push a single byte at all, so there's no way you could do a byte load / byte store from the stack. For a word, dword, or qword (depending on CPU mode), you could push [src] / pop [dst], but that's a lot slower than copying via a register. It introduces an extra store/reload store-forwarding latency before the data can be read from the final destination, and takes more uops.

Unless somewhere on the stack is the desired destination and you can't optimize that local variable into a register, in which case push [src] is just fine to copy it there and allocate stack space for it.

See https://agner.org/optimize/ and other x86 performance links in the x86 tag wiki

Just want to discuss "memory barrier" with you.
In c code

a = b;//Take data from b and puts it in a

would be assembled to

mov %eax, b # suppose %eax is used as the temp

mov a, %eax

The system cannot guarantee the atomicity of the assignment. That's why we need a rmb
(read barrier)