KnightOS has a brand new assembler, and this time a linker was invited to the party as well. Let’s introduce some of the things that make it awesome, as well as explain the motivation behind it and how it works. This post should be the first stop for anyone who hopes to contribute to the new assembler.

Without further ado: please welcome scas to the KnightOS world! scas stands for “SirCmpwn’s Assembler”, which is a throwback to the old “sass” assembler, but this time without binaries that conflict with a certain CSS preprocessor. This time, though, it’s not a solo effort. scas has currently been built by the efforts of myself, puckipedia, and mrout.

Background

KnightOS has been compiled by several different assemblers. In this order:

Zilog Developer Studio (proprietary and Windows-only)

spasm (Windows-only)

sass

scas

ZDS was pretty bad. I originally used it because Brandon Wilson used it for OS2 and I was using a lot of his project model. It was a poor choice for obvious reasons. Then, for a rather long time, KnightOS switched to spasm. However, spasm had problems with macros. After bugging the maintainers for a long time, it became clear that the problems weren’t going to be fixed. I got pretty sick of running it with Wine, too.

Enter stage: sass. At the time, I was more concerned with writing KnightOS than with writing assemblers, so sass is a very ugly codebase written in C#. However, it met a lot of really important goals:

Flexible assembly syntax that was compatible with most styles

More modern reccommended syntax

Local labels and flexible tooling

From the outside, sass looks like a great assembler. However, on the inside it’s an unmaintainable mess and only runs where Mono is available, which crosses out the pipe dream of a self-hosting KnightOS. The system was compiled with sass for a couple of years, and I decided fairly recently that it was time for a better scas.

What scas does better

scas is a complete rewrite of the assembler, this time done slowly and in C. It’s (mostly) compatible with several assembly syntaxes now:

sass

spasm

tasm

ASxxxx (new)

The last one is important - it’s the syntax the new KnightOS C compiler uses! The decision to build scas was largely kick-started by the desire to replace ASxxxx for kcc with something better. For that, we needed an assembler with a seperate linking step. And now we come to the most important change that scas brings to the table.

A seperate linker

The majority of assemblers targetting z80 do assembly and linking all at once. For those who are unaware, assembly is the process of translating mnomics into machine code, and linking is the process of resolving symbols. For example, if I were to assemble this code:

call example

I needn’t know about the “example” label if linking is done in a seperate step. Instead, I assemble this as if it reads call 0 and make a note of the fact that it references “example”. During the linking step, we gather all the symbols and resolve this reference when producing the final machine code.

Another good thing about linking is that it gives us greater control to modify code automatically. For example, scas is capable of automatically inserting KnightOS relocation instructions, and updating all the relevant references afterwards. We can also do things like optimizing out unused functions as indicated by kcc’s .function directives (this is an important part of our our libc works).

On top of that, a linker allows us to do incremental compilation. The kernel takes about 3.5 seconds to compile with sass, and compiling the entire userspace takes even longer. However, with scas, we can compile each file seperately and produced an unlinked object file, which just has machine code and references to other files. Recompiling a single object file in the kernel takes less than a tenth of a second, and then the only step left is linking. This starts to matter more when we throw some things like C sources into the mix.

There are many other doors opened by a seperate linker, and I’m happy that we’ve made the plunge. I hope to see more of the z80 community follow in our footsteps on this matter.

Current status

scas is nearly complete, but we haven’t fully replaced sass yet. The kernel is still built with sass, and some parts of the userspace still require it. There are bugs to iron out, and we need to port it to Windows (it runs in cygwin, though). I expect that we’ll be able to do some really cool things with it going forward, including the possibility of building out C for TIOS and even perhaps porting it to a few calculators! New contributors are as welcome as ever, so feel free to start hacking away with it.