1.1. Legal Blurb
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU
Free Documentation License Version 1.1;
with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover texts.
A copy of the license is included in the GNU Free Documentation License appendix.
The most recent official version of this document is available from the
Linux Assembly and
LDP sites.
If you are reading a few-months-old copy,
consider checking the above URLs for a new version.
1.2. Foreword
This document aims answering questions of those
who program or want to program 32-bit x86 assembly using
free software,
particularly under the Linux operating system.
At many places Universal Resource Locators (URL) are given
for some software or documentation repository.
This document also points to other documents about
non-free, non-x86, or non-32-bit assemblers,
although this is not its primary goal.
Also note that there are FAQs and docs about programming
on your favorite platform (whatever it is), which you should consult
for platform-specific issues, not related directly to assembly programming.
Because the main interest of assembly programming is to build
the guts of operating systems, interpreters, compilers, and games,
where C compiler fails to provide the needed expressiveness
(performance is more and more seldom as issue),
we are focusing on development of such kind of software.
If you don't know what
free software is,
please do read carefully
the GNU General Public License
(GPL or copyleft),
which is used in a lot of free software,
and is the model for most of their licenses.
It generally comes in a file named COPYING
(or COPYING.LIB).
Literature from the
Free Software Foundation
(FSF) might help you too.
Particularly, the interesting feature of free software
is that it comes with source code which you can consult and correct,
or sometimes even borrow from.
Read your particular license carefully and do comply to it.
1.3. Contributions
This is an interactively evolving document: you are especially invited
to ask questions,
to answer questions,
to correct given answers,
to give pointers to new software,
to point the current maintainer to bugs or deficiencies in the pages.
In one word, contribute!
To contribute, please contact the maintainer.
| At the time of writing, it is
Konstantin Boldyshev
and no more
Francois-Rene Rideau (since version 0.5).
I (Fare) had been looking for some time
for a serious hacker to replace me as maintainer of this document,
and am pleased to announce
Konstantin as my worthy successor. |