From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Steffen Solyga Subject: some thoughts and questions Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 02:58:58 +0200 Sender: linux-assembly-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <20040424005858.GA1194@absinth.net> References: <20040422231507.GA1495@absinth.net> <4089974B.1080604@earthlink.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4089974B.1080604@earthlink.net> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux assembly glad to see that i'm not alone with my subscription and my questions to come :-) Did somebody of you guys already try writing a boot loader? Not that i intend to write one... I'm quite new to x86 assembly; spent a lot of time programming the 6502/6510, turbo-stuff for the c64-floppy, but thats that long ago, about 15 years. When the PC came up I hated its design, because there was no need to have the cuircuit-drawing next to my box, no fixed addresses and so on. However, the games got me and I bought by first PC (386). And some years later I learned to love the UNIX boxes at the university... Well, that was just a short jump to Linux -- as users. Now, object oriented programming isn't exiting, let's try the opposite again. It's not just the result (working program) that counts, but the fun shifting bits, exploring the architecture. How do you feel about these tons of opcodes shipped with the x86 processors? Is it fun to know them all? Or is it just a waste of time to learn about block-move-instructions? (As far as I remember, the 8080 already had a block instruction -- I didn't believe it those days! Was'n there a loop?) By the way, if somebody of should have the guts to teach me something, i would be happy having my first assembly lines commented http://linux.xulin.de/asm/cmdline/cmdline.asm Meaning, "xor eax, eax" looks more interesting than "mov eax, 0", and I think there are a lot of x86-ideas I have to learn... The 6502 only had two flags usable for branching (zero+carry), and now I have two more (sign+parity) - how do I really make use of them? Thanks a lot, Steffen -- ---------------------------- Steffen Solyga mail: solyga@absinth.net www : http://linux.xulin.de/ ----------------------------