Copyright (c) 1996,1997 by François-René Rideau. This document may be distributed under the terms set forth in the LDP license at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/COPYRIGHT.html.
This is expectedly the last release I'll make of this document. There's one candidate new maintainer, but until he really takes the HOWTO over, I'll accept feedback.
You are especially invited to ask questions, to answer to questions, to correct given answers, to add new FAQ answers, to give pointers to other software, to point the current maintainer to bugs or deficiencies in the pages. If you're motivated, you could even TAKE OVER THE MAINTENANCE OF THE FAQ. In one word, contribute!
To contribute, please contact whoever appears to maintain the Assembly-HOWTO. Current maintainers are François-René Rideau and now Paul Anderson.
This document aims at answering frequently asked questions of people who program or want to program 32-bit x86 assembly using free assemblers, particularly under the Linux operating system. It may also point to other documents about non-free, non-x86, or non-32-bit assemblers, though such is not its primary goal.
Because the main interest of assembly programming is to build to write the guts of operating systems, interpreters, compilers, and games, where a C compiler fails to provide the needed expressivity (performance is more and more seldom an issue), we stress on development of such software.
This document contains answers to some frequently asked questions. At many places, Universal Resource Locators (URL) are given for some software or documentation repository. Please see that the most useful repositories are mirrored, and that by accessing a nearer mirror site, you relieve the whole Internet from unneeded network traffic, while saving your own precious time. Particularly, there are large repositories all over the world, that mirror other popular repositories. You should learn and note what are those places near you (networkwise). Sometimes, the list of mirrors is listed in a file, or in a login message. Please heed the advice. Else, you should ask archie about the software you're looking for...
The most recent version for this documents sits in
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Assembly-HOWTO or http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Assembly-HOWTO.sgml
but what's in Linux HOWTO repositories should be fairly up to date, too (I can't know):
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/ (?)
A french translation of this HOWTO can be found around
ftp://ftp.ibp.fr/pub/linux/french/HOWTO/
COPYING,
with a library version in a file named COPYING.LIB.
Litterature from the FSF (free software foundation)
might help you, too.
Each version includes a few fixes and minor corrections, which needs not be repeatedly mentionned every time.
Francois-Rene "Faré" Rideau <rideau@ens.fr> creates and publishes the first mini-HOWTO, because ``I'm sick of answering ever the same questions on comp.lang.asm.x86''
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found -fasm option to enable GCC inline assembler w/o -O optimizations
Created the History. Added pointers in cross-compiling section. Added section about I/O programming under Linux (particularly video).
more about cross-compiling -- See on sunsite: devel/msdos/
NASM is getting pretty slick
point to french translated version
What? I had forgotten to point to terse???
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text mini-HOWTO transformed into a full linuxdoc-sgml HOWTO, to see what the SGML tools are like.
first release of the HOWTO as such.
CREDITS section added
NASM moved: now is before AS86
Added section "DO YOU NEED ASSEMBLY?"
Vapor announce of a new Assembly-HOWTO maintainer.
Release for DrLinux
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still more on "how not to use assembly"; updates on NASM, GAS.
info on 16-bit mode access from Linux.
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release for LSL 6th edition.
This is yet another last-release-by-Faré-before-new-maintainer-takes-over (?)
I would like to thanks the following persons, by order of appearance: