I'm trying to get the following assembly (nasm style) to work:

section .text
        global _start
        msg     db      "Hello world!",0xa
        len     equ     $-msg
_syscall:
        int     0x80
        ret
_start:
        push    dword len
        push    dword msg
        push    dword 1
        mov     eax,0x4
        call    _syscall
        add     esp,12
        push    dword 0
        mov     eax,0x1
        call    _syscall

0x4 is the syscall "write" according to syscalls.master.
0x1 is the syscall "exit"..

this program works perfectly on my other netbsd machine at work.

running it through ALD (after getting ALD to compile successfully for
NetBSD) tells me that everything is proceeding as expected, and then
suddenly the syscall appears to fail--returning FFFFFFF7 in eax.

Isn't that something other than a simple "-1" like what write claims
to return in write(2)?

any particular reason why this sort of banging around wouldn't work?
Is int 0x80 the wrong one?

thanks!

marc tooley