Intel x86 Assembly Language & Microarchitecture Getting started with Intel x86 Assembly Language & Microarchitecture x86 Assembly Language

Example

The family of x86 assembly languages represents decades of advances on the original Intel 8086 architecture. In addition to there being several different dialects based on the assembler used, additional processor instructions, registers and other features have been added over the years while still remaining backwards compatible to the 16-bit assembly used in the 1980s.

The first step to working with x86 assembly is to determine what the goal is. If you are seeking to write code within an operating system, for example, you will want to additionally determine whether you will choose to use a stand-alone assembler or built-in inline assembly features of a higher level language such as C. If you wish to code down on the "bare metal" without an operating system, you simply need to install the assembler of your choice and understand how to create binary code that can be turned into flash memory, bootable image or otherwise be loaded into memory at the appropriate location to begin execution.

A very popular assembler that is well supported on a number of platforms is NASM (Netwide Assembler), which can be obtained from http://nasm.us/. On the NASM site you can proceed to download the latest release build for your platform.

Windows

Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of NASM are available for Windows. NASM comes with a convenient installer that can be used on your Windows host to install the assembler automatically.

Linux

It may well be that NASM is already installed on your version of Linux. To check, execute:

nasm -v

If the command is not found, you will need to perform an install. Unless you are doing something that requires bleeding edge NASM features, the best path is to use your built-in package management tool for your Linux distribution to install NASM. For example, under Debian-derived systems such as Ubuntu and others, execute the following from a command prompt:

sudo apt-get install nasm

For RPM based systems, you might try:

sudo yum install nasm

Mac OS X

Recent versions of OS X (including Yosemite and El Capitan) come with an older version of NASM pre-installed. For example, El Capitan has version 0.98.40 installed. While this will likely work for almost all normal purposes, it is actually quite old. At this writing, NASM version 2.11 is released and 2.12 has a number of release candidates available.

You can obtain the NASM source code from the above link, but unless you have a specific need to install from source, it is far simpler to download the binary package from the OS X release directory and unzip it.

Once unzipped, it is strongly recommended that you not overwrite the system-installed version of NASM. Instead, you might install it into /usr/local:

 $ sudo su
 <user's password entered to become root>
 # cd /usr/local/bin
 # cp <path/to/unzipped/nasm/files/nasm> ./
 # exit

At this point, NASM is in /usr/local/bin, but it is not in your path. You should now add the following line to the end of your profile:

 $ echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

This will prepend /usr/local/bin to your path. Executing nasm -v at the command prompt should now display the proper, newer, version.