So, Does Anyone Even Use All These Darn CPU Instructions? April 27, 2007

That’s the question I found myself asking earlier this month when I was writing a simple compiler for an OCaml dialect called MinCaml. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look at the Intel IA32 instruction references, but there are two volumes of detailed descriptions of all the functions one of these CPU provides: about 600 in total!

As this compiler backend was my first real go at writing out assembly (though I’d read quite a lot of it before) I found the task of potentially learning all these instructions extremely intimidating, and wished I had an assembly language “cheat sheet” where I could go to find out the most common (and hence probably the most useful) instructions. So, today I got around to writing a little program to use UDis86 to scan all the binaries in C:\Windows\System32 and my Cygwin /bin directory and spit out some instruction counts. Now, before we see the results let me first say that my sample has a bias in that it’s all precompiled stuff that will be designed to take advantage of only the lowest common denominator of the target CPU instruction sets. This means that the distribution below will probably be quite different than if you scan, say, your machine-specific Gentoo installation. Right, onto the big monstrous Excel pie chart:

I’ve also uploaded my raw data to my personal site, along with the program I used to get the results for anyone who is interested.

In the finest traditions of top 10 lists everywhere, let’s give a quick rundown of the most popular instructions:

add: is anyone really suprised by this? mov: again, it’s fairly hard to get work done without moving data around push/pop: these instructions are commonly used for setting up/destroying function stack frames, hence their popularity despite IA32s register orientation invalid: do’h! These are from areas of code where udis86 just barfs :-). Their high ranking could mean a lot of instructions are in use that it can’t deal with, or (more likely) it is trying to disassemble executable regions of the binary that just don’t have anything useful in them cmp: the absolute bedrock of branching on the IA32, but what is suprising is that it’s so much higher than jz. Are there really that many pure numeric comparisions in programs? dec/inc: I’m fairly suprised that dec beats inc here, especially since sub is so much lower than add in my data: does anyone have a theory? xor/or: xor no doubt clocks in so high because of the “xor reg, reg” idiom used to zero out registers, but or is quite popular too for something which is really only good for bit flags and the odd if expression…

Well that was fun, in a geeky sort of way! I’d be quite interested in knowing the reasons behind some of the oddities above: maybe another blog entry is in order…?

Edit: an experienced reverse engineer, t_w, commented on Reddit that my count for add was quite high, and that it might be caused by counting junk code. It turns out that the byte sequence 0x0000 disassembles to an add instruction, which skews my results since the null byte is common padding for executable .text sections. However, after correcting for this (the charts above have taken this into account) it still leaves add in first place (it had 83355055 counted occurances before excluding this sequence, but still 45303805 after exclusion).