6.32.7 MIPS assembler ¶

The MIPS assembler was originally written by Christian Pirker.

Currently the assembler and disassembler covers most of the MIPS32 architecture and doesn’t support FP instructions.

The register names $a0–$a3 are not available to avoid shadowing hex numbers. Use register numbers $4–$7 instead.

Nothing distinguishes registers from immediate values. Use explicit opcode names with the i suffix for instructions with immediate argument. E.g. addiu, in place of addu,.

Where the architecture manual specifies several formats for the instruction (e.g., for jalr,),use the one with more arguments (i.e. two for jalr,). When in doubt, see arch/mips/testasm.fs for an example of correct use.

Branches and jumps in the MIPS architecture have a delay slot. You have to fill it manually (the simplest way is to use nop,), the assembler does not do it for you (unlike as). Even if,, ahead,, until,, again,, while,, else, and repeat, need a delay slot. Since begin, and then, just specify branch targets, they are not affected. For branches the argument specifying the target is a relative address. Add the address of the delay slot to get the absolute address.

Note that you must not put branches nor jumps (nor control-flow instructions) into the delay slot. Also it is a bad idea to put pseudo-ops such as li, into a delay slot, as these may expand to several instructions. The MIPS I architecture also had load delay slots, and newer MIPSes still have restrictions on using mfhi, and mflo,. Be careful to satisfy these restrictions, the assembler does not do it for you.

Some example of instructions are:

$ra  12 $sp  sw,         \ sw    ra,12(sp)
$4    8 $s0  lw,         \ lw    a0,8(s0)
$v0  $0  lui,            \ lui   v0,0x0
$s0  $s4  $12  addiu,    \ addiu s0,s4,0x12
$s0  $s4  $4  addu,      \ addu  s0,s4,$a0
$ra  $t9  jalr,          \ jalr  t9

You can specify the conditions for if, etc. by taking a conditional branch and leaving away the b at the start and the , at the end. E.g.,

4 5 eq if,
  ... \ do something if $4 equals $5
then,

The calling conventions for 32-bit MIPS machines is to pass the first 4 arguments in registers $4..$7, and to use $v0-$v1 for return values. In addition to these registers, it is ok to clobber registers $t0-$t8 without saving and restoring them.

If you use jalr, to call into dynamic library routines, you must first load the called function’s address into $t9, which is used by position-indirect code to do relative memory accesses.

Here is an example of a MIPS32 abi-code word:

abi-code my+  ( n1 n2 -- n3 )
  \ SP passed in $4, returned in $v0
  $t0  4 $4  lw,         \ load n1, n2 from stack
  $t1  0 $4  lw,    
  $t0  $t0  $t1  addu,   \ add n1+n2, result in $t0
  $t0  4 $4  sw,         \ store result (overwriting n1)
  $ra  jr,               \ return to caller
  $v0  $4  4  addiu,     \ (delay slot) return uptated SP in $v0
end-code