Before we jump into 64-bit assembly on Linux, it's important to learn about 32-bit x86 assembly on Linux since it will make the transition to 64-bit go much more smoothly. While I understand most modern hosts run 64-bit operating systems, I'm a firm believer in solidifying basic knowledge before moving on to the current standard. With that said, I also don't believe we need to go too far back for the purposes of preparing you for the examples in this book. We'll go over the 8-bit and 16-bit registers while covering the 32-bit registers.
In modern 32-bit x86 processors, there are a total of eight general-purpose registers, six segment registers, an EFLAGS register, and an instruction pointer register. Some processors even contain additional registers to handle floating-point mathematical operations and extended registers for...
