6.50.1 Basic Asm — Assembler Instructions Without Operands ¶

A basic asm statement has the following syntax:

asm asm-qualifiers ( AssemblerInstructions )

For the C language, the asm keyword is a GNU extension. When writing C code that can be compiled with -ansi and the -std options that select C dialects without GNU extensions, use __asm__ instead of asm (see Alternate Keywords). For the C++ language, asm is a standard keyword, but __asm__ can be used for code compiled with -fno-asm.

Qualifiers ¶

volatile

The optional volatile qualifier has no effect. All basic asm blocks are implicitly volatile.

inline

If you use the inline qualifier, then for inlining purposes the size of the asm statement is taken as the smallest size possible (see Size of an asm).

Parameters ¶

AssemblerInstructions

This is a literal string that specifies the assembler code. The string can contain any instructions recognized by the assembler, including directives. GCC does not parse the assembler instructions themselves and does not know what they mean or even whether they are valid assembler input.

You may place multiple assembler instructions together in a single asm string, separated by the characters normally used in assembly code for the system. A combination that works in most places is a newline to break the line, plus a tab character (written as ‘\n\t’). Some assemblers allow semicolons as a line separator. However, note that some assembler dialects use semicolons to start a comment.