The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, June 05, 2020

A Lua module in assembly, why not?

I've been known to dabble in assembly language from time to time, and there's been this one instruction on the Intel Pentium that I've wanted to play around with—RDTSC. It's used to read the internal time-stamp counter which is incremented every clock cycle. On my system, this counter is incremented 2,660,000,000 times per second (the computer is running at 2.66GHz) and this makes for a nice way to time code, as the instruction is available in userspace (at least on Linux).

I wanted to use this to time some Lua code, which means I need to wrap this instruction into a function that can be called. I could have used some inline assembly in C to do this, but

  1. the code is non-portable anyway;
  2. I wanted to avoid as much C overhead as possible;
  3. and I thought it would be amusing to write an entire Lua module in assembly.

It wasn't hard:

;***************************************************************************
;
; Copyright 2020 by Sean Conner.
;
; This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
; under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
; the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
; option) any later version.
;
; This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
; WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
; or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Lesser General Public
; License for more details.
;
; You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
; along with this library; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
;
; Comments, questions and criticisms can be sent to: sean@conman.org
;
;***************************************************************************

                bits    32
                global  luaopen_rdtsc
                extern  lua_pushinteger
                extern  lua_pushcclosure

;***************************************************************************
                section .text

ldl_rdtsc:      rdtsc
                push    edx
                push    eax
                push    dword [esp + 12]
                call    lua_pushinteger	; lua_pushinteger(L,rdtsc);
                xor     eax,eax		; return 1
                inc     eax
                lea     esp,[esp + 12]
                ret

;---------------------------------------------------------------------------

luaopen_rdtsc:
                xor     eax,eax
                push    eax
                push    ldl_rdtsc
                push    dword [esp + 12]
                call    lua_pushcclosure ; lua_pushcclosure(L,ldl_rdtsc,0);
                xor     eax,eax		 ; return 1
                inc     eax
                lea     esp,[esp + 12]
                ret

I'll leave it up to the reader to convert this to 64-bit code.

Obligatory Picture

[Self-portrait with my new glasses]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2025 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.