Hello,

I'm attempting to overcome a long-time weakness with asm by coding up some
examples, starting with "Hello World".  Most of the resources I find are
for either x86, Linux or Microsoft/Intel-style asm.  I'd like to learn
using NetBSD/alpha and GNU as, since that is what I use.  I have been
reading the Alpha reference material and it appears I need to issue a
call_pal with a value of 0x83 (for syscall).  If I'm understanding the
material properly, I need to first push the arguments to the stack
(including the system call number).  I guess I'm hoping someone here would
be able to show a minimal example of how this is done under NetBSD.

This is what I have so far, which crashes and burns (sig11) on invocation:

.data

    mystr:      .asciz "Hello world!\n"
    len         = . - mystr - 1

.text
.globl __start

    __start:

        ldgp        $29,0($27)
        lda         $sp,-32($sp)
        ldq         $19,len
        lda         $18,mystr
        ldl         $17,1
        ldl         $16,4

        call_pal    0x83
        ret

thanks,
-bp
--
# bryan at darkforest dot org
# Software Engineer