64 bit immediate values

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ProphetOfDoom

Joined: 08 Aug 2008
Posts: 120
Location: UK

ProphetOfDoom

Hi, why does this code assemble:

Code:

format ELF64

section '.text' executable

add rax, 0x7fffffff
ret

But this code doesn't:

Code:

format ELF64

section '.text' executable

add rax, 0x80000000
ret

It seems it won't allow any immediate value which has the sign bit set? But why? I read this here http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/assembly.html

Quote:

Immediates

Immediate values inside instructions remain 32 bits and their value is sign extended to 64 bits before calculation. This means that:

addq $1, %rax # Valid instruction
addq $0x7fffffff, %rax # As this
addq $0xffffffffffffffff, %rax # as this one
addq $0xffffffff, %rax # Invalid instruction
addl $0xffffffff, %eax # Valid instruction

But I still don't understand why? Could someone explain please. Thanks in advance.

11 Jul 2011, 03:30

revolution
When all else fails, read the source

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 17878
Location: In your JS exploiting you and your system

revolution

Immediate values are stored in a signed 32 bit format within the instruction encoding. You can't store 0x0000000080000000 because that would need 33 bits minimum.

You can encode values from 0xffffffff80000000 to 0xffffffffffffffff, and 0x0000000000000000 to 0x000000007fffffff

The sign bit of the 32 bit immediate is copied into the high order 32 bits of the 64 bit number.

11 Jul 2011, 03:39

ProphetOfDoom

Joined: 08 Aug 2008
Posts: 120
Location: UK

ProphetOfDoom

Thanks revolution, I think I get it now. Smile

11 Jul 2011, 04:23

Madis731

Joined: 25 Sep 2003
Posts: 2140
Location: Estonia

Madis731

When I didn't understand it, I made a graph on paper to visualize it.
It looked something like:
xxxx...............................yyyy
where xxxx are positive (32-bit) integers and yyyy are negative.
You cannot encode values that are too large or too small. So about -4 billion to +4 billion are okay, but others values should be MOVed to register first or read from memory.

11 Jul 2011, 07:48

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