gas: too many memory reference

assembly x86 gnu-assembler att
freenight picture freenight · Mar 28, 2010 · Viewed 8.9k times · Source

When compiling the following instruction:

movl 4(%ebp), 8(%ebp)

I got: too many memory reference.

What's wrong with it?

Answer

Marc W picture Marc W · Mar 28, 2010

The number before the parenthesis is a byte offset (which causes a memory reference to occur), and you cannot have two of them with movl. You need to move the value temporarily to a register first.

movl 4(%ebp), %ecx
movl %ecx, 8(%ebp)

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