2.2. Sections¶
Assembled code is broken into logical sections that are used in different ways. The bits that represent instructions must be executable but should generally not be writable. The bits that represent data should be readable and writable but may not make sense to execute.
Some common sections:
text stores the code of the program
data stores global data that can be read or written
rodata stores global information that is Read Only (constants)
bss has uninitialized blank space that we have reserved for use by the program to store data
Directives are used to specify what section various parts of an assembly program belong to:
.section .data
myGlobal: .word 0xC
.section .rodata
MY_CONSTANT: .word 0x64
.section .bss
uninitializedGlobal: .space 4
.text
.global _start
_start:
@Do nothing...
MOV r1, #0
end: b end @stop program
That code gets build into what is shown below. Some things to note:
The sections appear in a specific order:
text,rodata,data, thenbss.Sections may be padded with extra 0’s to make them occupy a number of bytes that is some specific power of 2. We can see this below at the end of the .data, .bss. and .rodata sections: they have all been padded so that the next section starts at an address that is a multiple of 8.
Note
Most of the time, this tutorial will stick to using just using .data for
all data and .text for the code. We will generally not use .rodata or .bss.