x86 Assembly on Mac OS X

Quicksilver31337 asks: "I am currently taking an Assembly course which requires that I be able to compile ASM for the intel x86; however, I am stubbornly a Mac user. Having no desire to switch from my Powerbook, what can I do to work with, compile, and run x86 ASM short of running VirtualPC?" While Mac OS X does use gcc and its associated tool-chain, an old Slashdot discussion seems to imply that cross-compiling is better under OpenDarwin than Mac OS X. Has anyone tried cross-compiling under both operating systems? If so, what suggestions on setting up a working tool-chain do you have?

Comments

DOSBox + NASM

[Anonymous Coward]

Get NASM (Netwide Assembler) and DOSBox or Bochs (x86 emulators).

Re:DOSBox + NASM

[fm6]

The Mac version of DOSBox is available here. Also handy for running old DOS games under 32-bit Windows, Linux, and of course Mac.

Re:Choice...

[Atzanteol]

Like these people:

http://www.testdrive.hp.com/

You want QEMU!

[Per Wigren]

First, install QEmu. (I prefer to install it through DarwinPorts)

Then download a x86 Linux Live CD ISO, for example Knoppix.

Then:
$ qemu -cdrom knoppix.iso -boot d

Simple as that. Networking will work out of the box.

You can also install Debian on a virtual harddrive using:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=sarge.hdimage bs=1000000 count=2000
$ qemu -hda sarge.hdimage -cdrom debian-netinst.iso -boot d
When installed, start QEmu with:
$ qemu -hda sarge.hdimage

Even better, after installation, copy the kernel and the initrd to your Mac (using sftp) and start qemu with:

$ qemu -hda sarge.hdimage -kernel kernel-file -initrd initrd-file -append "root=/dev/hda1 console=ttyS0,38600" -nographics

Then you will get the console on a virtual serial port (which is your current terminal window) and it doesn't have to emulate any graphics at all.

virtualPC, bochs, qemu, all fine

[snorklewacker]

This is almost certainly an intro course. He's not writing device drivers, he's going to be writing an implementation of dijkstra's algorithm or binsort or matrix arithmetic or something. I doubt he's going to have to analyze pipeline and branch prediction behavior either. So just throw it into an emulator, it'll be fine.

Your prof sincerely will NOT CARE that you used virtualPC or whatever, as long as you did the assignment. He WILL care if you're some whiny fanboy who can't stop moaning about how kludgy and crocky the x86 architecture is and how you sing love songs to your powerpc mac every night and how you had to condescend to use an emulator only IF this dinosaur of a professor who stoops so low to use this architecture might deign to look up to your lofty height and permit you to use an emulator blah blah. Just use the damn emulator and hand in the assignment. Chances are he won't notice, and if he does, then go buy a cheap old PC and get on with life.

Horse nuggets.

[kma]

What do you mean, "how that architecture REALLY" responds?" The whole point of an "architecture" is that there can be more than one implementation of said architecture. AMD and Intel provide hardware implementations of the x86; VirtualPC, bochs, et al. provide software implementations of it. Differences amongst those different implementations come down to either unspecified parts of the architecture, or bugs, be those bugs in hardware or software.

Bochs is every bit as real an implementation of the x86 as a Pentium 4. In the outrageously unlikely event that bochs doesn't run this guy's assembly code correctly, he should report a bug, just as he would do in the even more outrageously unlikely event that an Intel processor runs his code wrong.