Howto reference a table in a structure in assembler

[Greg Smith]

I have a program that calls functions from a table indexed by a byte
value from an array.  Some of the byte values require a second lookup.
I am trying to optimize these cases.

For example:

typedef void (func)(unsigned char *, struct x *);

struct x {
 . . .
 func tab[256];
 . . .
 func tab_a7[256];
 . . .
}

 /* call primary function */
 call x->tab[a[0]](a, x);

 /* function a7 calls secondary function */
void a7(unsigned char *a, struct x *x) {
 call x->tab_a7[a[1]](a, x);
}

This is all well and good, but I would like to eliminate some of
the overhead in the secondary function (just saving a few instructions
helps out tremendously ... this is a hardware emulator).

For i686, a is in register %eax and x is in %edx.  I would like
to do something like

void a7(unsigned char *a, struct x *x) {
 goto x->tab_a7[a[1]];
}

However, this does

 movzbl 1(%eax),%eax
 jmp    *1540(%eax,%edx)

clobbering %eax.  I would like to do instead (if I have to do it in
assembler):

 movzbl 1(%eax),%ecx
 jmp    *tab_a7(%ecx,%edx)

But, how do I specify the tab_a7 offset to the assembler?  I certainly
don't want to hard code it.

Or, is there a better way?

Thank you,
Greg Smith