I've been reading Assembly Language Step-By-Step (3rd edition; by Jeff Duntemann). I have a Linux box, a Lion box, and a (PPC) Tiger machine I can use. I've been writing small assembly programs with NASM on the Lion and Linux machines, and would like to do so on the Tiger one.
Mind you, I never expected this to be easy.
I'm not quite sure how I should change the code to work on PPC. I've so far ran into three expression syntax errors (lines 2, 3, and 14) that I can't figure out.
(I don't have a firm grasp of the PPC instruction set in the least.)
The code I'm trying to assemble is such: (ignore the line numbers)
1 SECTION .data
2 str: db "Hello, World!",0x10
3 len: equ $-str
4
5 SECTION .bss
6
7 SECTION .text
8 global start
9
10 start:
11 nop
12 mov eax,4
13 mov ebx,1
14 mov ecx,str
15 mov edx,len
16 int 0x80
17
18 mov eax,1
19 mov ebx,0
20 int 0x80
(I do realize that PPC is dying and there's not much point in figuring out its assembly, but learning is never a bad thing.)
nasm is an assembler for x86 / x86-64. You need to look at using the native (Mach-O ppc) as or gcc extended asm. It's not just a matter of changing opcodes - some directives will be invalid for ppc too. So you will need a firm grasp on PPC assembly.
It's also premature to say that power is dying. IBM POWER7 is still the "fastest" general purpose processor available. Also consider the Cell architecture and embedded markets.