GCC Inline Assembly: Jump to label outside block

assemblycgccinline-assemblyx86

When using inline assembly under MSVC, one is allowed to jump outside of the assembly block by referencing a label in the C/C++ code, as explained in this MSDN article.

Can such thing be done when using inline assembly under GCC?

Here's an example of what I'm trying to accomplish:

__asm__ __volatile__ (
"   /* assembly code */ "
"   jz external_label;  "
);

/* some C code */

external_label:
/* C code coninues... */

The compiler, however, complains about "external_label" not being defined.

Best Answer

The code in this answer happens to work, but is undefined behaviour and will in general break things with optimization enabled. It's only safe to jmp out of an inline asm statement with asm goto, or under limited circumstances when the asm statement is followed by __builtin_unreachable();

(That's not usable here: it's never safe to jump into the middle of an inline asm statement and then fall out into compiler-generated code again inside a function.)

What if you define the label with the assembler?

asm("external_label:");

Update: this code seems to work:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main(void)
{
  asm("jmp label");
  puts("You should not see this.");
  asm("label:");

  return 0;
}

Related Solutions

Using GCC to produce readable assembly

If you compile with debug symbols (add -g to your GCC command line, even if you're also using -O3¹), you can use objdump -S to produce a more readable disassembly interleaved with C source.

>objdump --help
[...]
-S, --source             Intermix source code with disassembly
-l, --line-numbers       Include line numbers and filenames in output

objdump -drwC -Mintel is nice:

-r shows symbol names on relocations (so you'd see puts in the call instruction below)
-R shows dynamic-linking relocations / symbol names (useful on shared libraries)
-C demangles C++ symbol names
-w is "wide" mode: it doesn't line-wrap the machine-code bytes
-Mintel: use GAS/binutils MASM-like .intel_syntax noprefix syntax instead of AT&T
-S: interleave source lines with disassembly.

You could put something like alias disas="objdump -drwCS -Mintel" in your ~/.bashrc. If not on x86, or if you like AT&T syntax, omit -Mintel.

Example:

> gcc -g -c test.c
> objdump -d -M intel -S test.o

test.o:     file format elf32-i386


Disassembly of section .text:

00000000 <main>:
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
   0:   55                      push   ebp
   1:   89 e5                   mov    ebp,esp
   3:   83 e4 f0                and    esp,0xfffffff0
   6:   83 ec 10                sub    esp,0x10
    puts("test");
   9:   c7 04 24 00 00 00 00    mov    DWORD PTR [esp],0x0
  10:   e8 fc ff ff ff          call   11 <main+0x11>

    return 0;
  15:   b8 00 00 00 00          mov    eax,0x0
}
  1a:   c9                      leave  
  1b:   c3                      ret

Note that this isn't using -r so the call rel32=-4 isn't annotated with the puts symbol name. And looks like a broken call that jumps into the middle of the call instruction in main. Remember that the rel32 displacement in the call encoding is just a placeholder until the linker fills in a real offset (to a PLT stub in this case, unless you statically link libc).

Footnote 1: Interleaving source can be messy and not very helpful in optimized builds; for that, consider https://godbolt.org/ or other ways of visualizing which instructions go with which source lines. In optimized code there's not always a single source line that accounts for an instruction but the debug info will pick one source line for each asm instruction.

C++ – Labels in GCC inline assembly

A declaration of a local label is indeed a number followed by a colon. But a reference to a local label needs a suffix of f or b, depending on whether you want to look forwards or backwards - i.e. 1f refers to the next 1: label in the forwards direction.

So declaring the label as 1: is correct; but to reference it, you need to say jmp 1f (because you are jumping forwards in this case).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using GCC to produce readable assembly

C++ – Labels in GCC inline assembly

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