Chapter 15. Introduction to Assembly

Before you can really become proficient in the art of UNIX system crash dump analysis, you will have to be comfortable with an assembly language. Which assembly depends on the CPU with which you are working, as you’ll soon understand.

We recognize that many system administrators may not yet feel they are proficient in any assembly language. With this in mind, we will now introduce you to the general concepts involved. In the next chapter, we will look closely at one assembly language: SPARC assembly.

High-level vs. low-level languages

Languages such as C, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, and COBOL are often referred to as high-level languages. From a programmer’s point of view, when writing in a high-level language, it ...

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