4 ms·

It's used in bits of kernel programming - often because there is no other way to do the task.

• tptacek 17y ago
  Modern kernels have very little assembly, outside of things like locore. They've heavily abstracted away the things you'd normally write in assembly, like modifying MSRs; also, so much of what you do now is simply memory mapped. In all of xnu, not counting AES, there are ~17kloc in x86 assembly, most of it in osfmk/i386 --- where no normal developer is ever going to go. There are over 730kloc in C.
  • rythie 17y ago
    I wasn't implying there was a lot, just that sometimes that's the only way.
    • tptacek 17y ago
      I'm just saying, even as a kernel dev, you're unlikely to need to write things in assembly.