Conversation
jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Still useful and also frequently used references in 2026 :-)

#x86 #arm #assembly
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caesarcattus@infosec.exchange

Caesar Cattus

Reply to @jarkko

@jarkko Memories of old times...

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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Reply to @caesarcattus@infosec.exchange
@caesarcattus ARM version is still quite new :-) i recall it came maybe 2024'ish.
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caesarcattus@infosec.exchange

Caesar Cattus

Reply to @jarkko

@jarkko
Yes, I know. I have the latest version of the x86-64 version and others similar. Assembler is difficult and fascinating.

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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Reply to @caesarcattus@infosec.exchange
Edited 13 hours ago
@caesarcattus QEMU is great tool for learning and actually C compiler is too. If I need to learn a new uarch, I usually just compile a random program and look and simplify the resulting code.

With GCC/LLVM you get the assembly source code with "gcc -S -fverbose-asm hello.c".
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caesarcattus@infosec.exchange

Caesar Cattus

Reply to @jarkko

@jarkko
Yes! I do that for fun sometimes. I have a couple of VMs in Boxes where I play around with C, Assembly, and Go. Now I'm learning Rust. I also sometimes do a bit of reverse engineering out of curiosity and for fun. Small things to learn.

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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Reply to @caesarcattus@infosec.exchange
@caesarcattus If it helps you, I personally would have never learned in the first place by reading the art of assembly books above. I'm more like "blackbox learner" when something is way too complex to cope. E.g., if I get a huge pile of source code, the first thing I do is to run tools like strace, maybe some temporary log messages here and sometimes bpftrace. Then I might try to figure next what are "sources" and "sinks" i.e., how it does I/O. Once you do that for a while even something quite messy starts to make sense.
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caesarcattus@infosec.exchange

Caesar Cattus

Reply to @jarkko

@jarkko
That's how I started in the 90s, when I had no way of getting books. In 1990, using my sister's x286 computer, I started tinkering with code in BASIC, Fortran, and C. I didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing until I met a couple of guys who knew a lot. I'm currently looking for code for some projects on GitHub and making some messes on my machine. I agree that many things are learned better this way. Although programming was never my job nor did I earn a living from it, it helped me in some jobs I had.

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