[SOLVED] Why can't local variable be used in GNU C basic inline asm statements?

Issue

Why cannot I use local variables from main to be used in basic asm inline? It is only allowed in extended asm, but why so?

(I know local variables are on the stack after return address (and therefore cannot be used once the function return), but that should not be the reason to not use them)

And example of basic asm:

int a = 10; //global a
int b = 20; //global b
int result;

int main() {
    asm ( "pusha\n\t"
          "movl a, %eax\n\t"
          "movl b, %ebx\n\t"
          "imull %ebx, %eax\n\t"
          "movl %eax, result\n\t"
          "popa");

    printf("the answer is %d\n", result);
    return 0;
}

example of extended:

int main (void) {
    int data1 = 10;  //local var - could be used in extended
    int data2 = 20;
    int result;

    asm ( "imull %%edx, %%ecx\n\t"
          "movl %%ecx, %%eax" 
          : "=a"(result)
          : "d"(data1), "c"(data2));

    printf("The result is %d\n",result);
    return 0;
}

Compiled with: gcc -m32 somefile.c

platform: uname -a: Linux 5.0.0-32-generic #34-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 2 02:06:48 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Solution

There is little distinction between "Basic asm" and "Extended asm"; "basic asm" is just a special case where the __asm__ statement has no lists of outputs, inputs, or clobbers. The compiler does not do % substitution in the assembly string for Basic asm. If you want inputs or outputs you have to specify them, and then it's what people call "extended asm".

In practice, it may be possible to access external (or even file-scope static) objects from "basic asm". This is because these objects will (respectively may) have symbol names at the assembly level. However, to perform such access you need to be careful of whether it is position-independent (if your code will be linked into libraries or PIE executables) and meets other ABI constraints that might be imposed at linking time, and there are various considerations for compatibility with link-time optimization and other transformations the compiler may perform. In short, it's a bad idea because you can't tell the compiler that a basic asm statement modified memory. There's no way to make it safe.

A "memory" clobber (Extended asm) can make it safe to access static-storage variables by name from the asm template.

The use-case for basic asm is things that modify the machine state only, like asm("cli") in a kernel to disable interrupts, without reading or writing any C variables. (Even then, you'd often use a "memory" clobber to make sure the compiler had finished earlier memory operations before changing machine state.)

Local (automatic storage, not static ones) variables fundamentally never have symbol names, because they don't exist in a single instance; there's one object per live instance of the block they're declared in, at runtime. As such, the only possible way to access them is via input/output constraints.

Users coming from MSVC-land may find this surprising since MSVC's inline assembly scheme papers over the issue by transforming local variable references in their version of inline asm into stack-pointer-relative accesses, among other things. The version of inline asm it offers however is not compatible with an optimizing compiler, and little to no optimization can happen in functions using that type of inline asm. GCC and the larger compiler world that grew alongside C out of unix does not do anything similar.

Answered By - R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE

Answer Checked By - Katrina (WPSolving Volunteer)