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--- en:multiasm:cs:chapter_3_10 [2025/12/10 14:43] – [Program control flow destination addressing] ktokarz
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+====== Fundamentals of Addressing Modes ======
+Addressing Mode is the way in which the argument of an instruction is specified. The addressing mode defines a rule for interpreting the address field of the instruction before the operand is reached. Addressing mode is used in instructions that operate on data or change the program flow.
+===== Data addressing =====
+Instructions that reach the data can specify the data placement. The data is an argument of the instruction, sometimes called an operand. Operands can be of one of the following: register, immediate, direct memory, or indirect memory.
+As in this part of the book, the reader doesn't know any assembler instructions, we will use the hypothetical instruction //copy//, which copies data from the source operand to the destination operand. The order of the operands will be similar to high-level languages, where the left operand is the destination and the right operand is the source. Copying data from //a// to //b// will be done with an instruction as in the following example:
+<code>
+ copy b, a
+</code>
+**Register operand** is used where the data which the processor wants to reach is stored or is intended to be stored in the register. If we assume that //a// and //b// are both registers named //R0// and //R1//, the instruction for copying data from //R0// to //R1// will look as in the following example and as shown in the Fig.{{ref>addrregister}}.
+<code>
+ copy R1, R0
+</code>
+<figure addrregister>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_register.png?600 |Illustration of addressing registers}}
+<caption>Illustration of addressing registers</caption>
+</figure>
+**An immediate operand** is a constant or the result of a constant expression. The assembler encodes immediate values into the instruction at assembly time. The operand of this type can be only one in the instruction and is always at the source place in the operands list.
+Immediate operands are used to initialise the register or variable, as numbers for comparison. An immediate operand, as it's encoded in the instruction, is placed in code memory, not in data memory and can't be modified during software execution. It is shown in Fig {{ref>addrimmediate}}. Instruction which initialises register //R1// with the constant (immediate) value of //5// looks like this:
+<code>
+ copy R1, 5
+</code>
+<figure addrimmediate>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_immediate.png?600 |Illustration of immediate addressing mode}}
+<caption>Illustration of immediate addressing mode</caption>
+</figure>
+**A direct memory operand** specifies the data at a given address. An address can be given in numerical form or as the name of the previously defined variable. It is equivalent to a static variable definition in high-level languages. If we assume that the //var// represents the address of the variable, the instruction which copies data from the variable to //R1// can look like in the following code and in Fig {{ref>addrdirect}}.
+<code>
+ copy R1, var
+</code>
+<figure addrdirect>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_direct.png?600 |Illustration of direct addressing mode}}
+<caption>Illustration of direct addressing mode</caption>
+</figure>
+**Indirect memory operand** is accessed by specifying the name of the register whose value represents the address of the memory location to reach.  We can compare the indirect addressing to the pointer in high-level languages, where the variable does not store the value but points to the memory location where the value is stored. Indirect addressing can also be used to access elements of the table in a loop, where we use the index value, which changes every loop iteration, rather than a single address. Different assemblers use different notations for indirect addressing; some use brackets, others square brackets, and others the//@// symbol. Even different assembler programs for the same processor can differ. In the following example, visible in Fig {{ref>addrindirect}}, we assume square brackets are used. The instruction which copies the data from the memory location addressed by the content of the //R0// register to //R1// register would look like this:
+<code>
+ copy R1, [R0]
+</code>
+<figure addrindirect>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_indirect.png?600 |Illustration of indirect addressing mode}}
+<caption>Illustration of indirect addressing mode</caption>
+</figure>
+**Variations of indirect addressing**. The indirect addressing mode can have many variations in which the final address need not be the contents of a single register; it can be the sum of a constant and one or more registers. Some variants implement automatic incrementation (similar to the "++" operator) or decrementation ("- -") of the index register before or after instruction execution to speed up processing of tables. For example, accessing elements of the table where the base address of the table is named //data_table// and the register //R0// holds the index of the byte which we want to copy from a table to //R1// could look like in Fig {{ref>addrindex}}, and in the code example:
+<code>
+ copy R1, table[R0]
+</code>
+<figure addrindex>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_index.png?600 |Illustration of indirect index addressing mode}}
+<caption>Illustration of indirect index addressing mode</caption>
+</figure>
+Addressing mode with pre-decrementation (decrementing before instruction execution) could look like this:
+<code>
+ copy R1, table[--R0]
+</code>
+Addressing mode with post-incrementation (incrementing after instruction execution) could look like this:
+<code>
+ copy R1, table[R0++]
+</code>
+===== Program control flow destination addressing =====
+The operand of jump, branch, or function call instructions addresses the destination of the program flow control. The result of these instructions is the change of the Instruction Pointer content. Jump instructions should be avoided in high-level structural or object-oriented languages, but they are common in assembler programming. Our examples will use the hypothetic //jump// instruction with a single operand—the destination address.
+**Direct addressing** of the destination is similar to direct data addressing. It specifies the destination address as the constant value, usually represented by a name. In assembler, we define the names of the addresses in code as //labels//. In the following example, shown in Fig {{ref>jumpdirect}} and in the code, the program will jump to the label named //destin//:
+<code>
+ jump destin
+</code>
+<figure jumpdirect>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:jump_direct.png?600 |Illustration of addressing in direct jump}}
+<caption>Illustration of addressing in direct jump</caption>
+</figure>
+**Indirect addressing** of the destination, as shown in Fig {{ref>jumpindirect}} uses the content of the register as the address where the program will jump. In the following example, the processor will jump to the destination address, which is stored in //R0//:
+<code>
+ jump [R0]
+</code>
+<figure jumpindirect>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:jump_indirect.png?600 |Illustration of addressing in indirect jump}}
+<caption>Illustration of addressing in indirect jump</caption>
+</figure>
+===== Absolute and Relative addressing =====
+In all previous examples, the addresses were specified as values representing the **absolute** memory location. The resulting address (even calculated as the sum of some values) was the memory location counted from the beginning of the memory, address "0". It is presented in Fig{{ref>addrabsolute}}.
+<figure addrabsolute>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_absolute.png?600 |Illustration of absolute addressing of the variable}}
+<caption>Illustration of absolute addressing of the variable</caption>
+</figure>
+Absolute addressing is simple and doesn't require any additional calculations by the processor. It is often used in embedded systems, where the software is installed and configured by the designer, and the location of programs does not change.
+Absolute addressing is difficult to use in general-purpose operating systems like Linux or Windows, where users can start a variety of programs, and their placement in memory varies each time they're loaded and executed. Much more useful is the **relative addressing**, where operands are specified as differences from a memory location and some known value, which can be easily modified and accessed. Often, the operands are provided relative to the Instruction Pointer, which allows the program to be loaded at any address in the address space, but the distance between the currently executed instruction and the location of the data it wants to reach is always the same. This is the default addressing mode in the Windows operating system, working on x64 machines. It is illustrated in Fig{{ref>addrrelative}}.
+<figure addrrelative>
+{{ :en:multiasm:cs:addressing_relative.png?600 |Illustration of IP relative addressing of the variable}}
+<caption>Illustration of IP relative addressing of the variable</caption>
+</figure>
+Relative addressing is also implemented in many jump, branch or loop instructions.