Subroutines

In the previous lecture we saw the stack: a region of memory that grows downwards, that you push values onto and pop them back off, with one register keeping track of where the top is. Let's now use it for calling code.

Say you wrote the instructions that double a number, and you need them in five places in your program. You could write them out five times, but then every time you change your mind you have to find all five copies and fix each one. In C you would write a function instead, and call it:

int doubled(int x) {
    return x + x;
}

int quadrupled(int x) {
    x = doubled(x);
    x = doubled(x);
    return x;
}

int main() {
    int y = quadrupled(10);
}

In assembly a piece of code you can jump to from anywhere, and that goes back to whoever jumped to it, is called a subroutine (you will also hear procedure, routine, or simply function). The words C uses for its pieces mean the same things here:

• Call: in C, quadrupled(10) stops main and starts running quadrupled. In assembly a call is a jump to the subroutine's first instruction.
• Return: in C, return x; ends quadrupled and carries on inside main right after the call. In assembly it is a jump back to that point.
• Return address: where the return jumps to, the address of the instruction right after the call. C never shows it to you, in assembly the call has to leave it somewhere.
• Parameter and argument: x is the parameter of doubled, the 10 that main hands over is the argument. In assembly they travel in a register or on the stack.
• Return value: what return hands back, the int in front of doubled. In assembly it comes back in a register the two sides agreed on.

The return address

Jumping to the subroutine is a branch to a label, which we saw in branching. Coming back needs more, because "back" is a different address every time, each call has to return to the instruction that follows that particular call.

So whoever calls leaves the return address where the subroutine can find it. The M68K leaves it on the stack, RISC-V in a register.

The return address on the stack

bsr label (branch to subroutine) pushes the address of the next instruction onto the stack and jumps to the label. rts (return from subroutine) pops it back off into the program counter, so the program carries on where it left off.

Build this one and step through it. It is the C above, so there is a call inside a call. Watch the program counter on the top right, and a7, the stack pointer, drop by 4 at every bsr and climb back at every rts.

Here is where we see the stack being used. In this simulator every instruction takes four bytes (a real 68000 packs them in two to ten, the idea is the same) and the program starts at 0x1000, so the instructions sit at these addresses:

address	instruction
0x1000	move.l #10, d0
0x1004	bsr quadrupled
0x1008	move.l d0, d1
0x100C	bra end
0x1010	bsr doubled
0x1014	bsr doubled
0x1018	rts
0x101C	add.l d0, d0
0x1020	rts

Before the first call the stack is empty and a7 holds 0x1000000, one past the last byte of memory (🟢 is the stack pointer, ???????? is memory we know nothing about):

address	value
0xFFFFF8	????????
0xFFFFFC	????????
0x1000000	🟢

The bsr quadrupled at 0x1004 pushes the address of the instruction after it, 0x1008, and then jumps:

address	value
0xFFFFF8	????????
0xFFFFFC	🟢 00001008
0x1000000

quadrupled calls doubled, and that bsr, at 0x1010, pushes 0x1014 under the return address already there:

address	value
0xFFFFF8	🟢 00001014
0xFFFFFC	00001008
0x1000000

The rts of doubled pops 0x1014 into the program counter, so the program goes on at the second bsr doubled, and the stack pointer climbs back by 4. The value stays in memory, we are just not supposed to read it any more:

address	value
0xFFFFF8	00001014
0xFFFFFC	🟢 00001008
0x1000000

That second bsr doubled pushes 0x1018 the same way and its rts pops it, and then the rts of quadrupled pops 0x1008:

address	value
0xFFFFF8	00001018
0xFFFFFC	00001008
0x1000000	🟢

The return address in a register

RISC-V does not touch memory for this. jal ra, label (jump and link) writes the address of the next instruction into the register you name, by convention ra, and then jumps. ret jumps to whatever is in ra.

That is cheaper than a push, but there is a catch, there is only one ra. If doubled called a subroutine of its own, that jal would write a new return address into ra and the program would lose the address where to return to. So a subroutine that calls anything else pushes ra on the stack first and pops it back before ret. So the stack is used either way, RISC-V just does not make you use it when you don't have to.

Passing values

But how do we pass the parameter x? The hardware has no concept of parameters in procedures, so we need to write that logic ourselves: the caller writes the argument somewhere and the subroutine reads it from that same place. The agreement on where is the calling convention.

In the two programs above the agreement was "the argument arrives in d0 (or a0), the return value leaves in the same register", which works because we wrote both sides. The real conventions of each assembly language are standardized and everyone follows them. For example in RISC-V the a registers are the argument registers, a0 to a7, which is where the letter comes from, and the return value comes back in a0.

A convention also says which registers a subroutine may change. One that uses d3 for scratch work destroys what the caller kept there, so either the subroutine pushes d3 on entry and pops it before returning, or the caller saves it before making the call. Both are done in practice, and the convention is the list of which registers a subroutine must leave as it found them and which it may change.

Recursion

A subroutine can call itself, and every call gets its own private copy of whatever it pushed, because every call pushes at a different address.

Step through it and watch a7 fall as the calls go deeper and climb back as they return. The bsr factorial inside the routine is at 0x101C, so it pushes 0x1020, the move.l (sp)+, d1 after it, and the first call, the one at 0x1004 outside the routine, pushed 0x1008. With n = 5 the deepest point comes when d0 reaches 1:

address	value
0xFFFFDC	🟢 00001020
0xFFFFE0	00000002
0xFFFFE4	00001020
0xFFFFE8	00000003
0xFFFFEC	00001020
0xFFFFF0	00000004
0xFFFFF4	00001020
0xFFFFF8	00000005
0xFFFFFC	00001008

Five return addresses and four copies of n, one per call, and we never had to choose an address for any of them, the stack pointer did it.

Try changing move.l #5, d0 to move.l #8, d0 and count how much further down a7 gets.