SPARC Assembly Language Reference Manual

3.8 Assembler Directives

Assembler directives, or pseudo-operations (pseudo-ops), are commands to the assembler that may or may not result in the generation of code. The different types of assembler directives are:

See Appendix A, Pseudo-Operations for a complete description of the pseudo-ops supported by the SPARC assembler.

3.8.1 Section Control Directives

When a section is created, a section header is generated and entered in the ELF object file section header table. The section control pseudo-ops allow you to make entries in this table. Sections that can be manipulated with the section control directives are known as user sections. You can also use the section control directives to change the user section in which code or data is generated.


Note –

The symbol table, relocation table, and string table sections are created implicitly. The section control pseudo-ops cannot be used to manipulate these sections.


The section control directives also create a section symbol which is associated with the location at the beginning of each created section. The section symbol has an offset value of zero.

3.8.2 Symbol Attribute Directives

The symbol attribute pseudo-ops declare the symbol type and size and whether it is local or global.

3.8.3 Assignment Directive

The assignment directive associates the value and type of expression with the symbol and creates a symbol table entry for the symbol. This directive constitutes a definition of the symbol and, therefore, must be the only definition of the symbol.

3.8.4 Data Generating Directives

The data generating directives are used for allocating storage and loading values.