Question

How do I use RIP Relative Addressing in a Linux assembly program for the AMD64 archtitecture?
I am looking for a simple example (a Hello world program) that uses the AMD64 RIP relative adressing mode.

For example the following 64-bit assembly program would work with normal (absolute addressing):

.text
    .global _start

_start:
    mov $0xd, %rdx

    mov $msg, %rsi
    pushq $0x1
    pop %rax
    mov %rax, %rdi
    syscall

    xor %rdi, %rdi
    pushq $0x3c
    pop %rax
    syscall

.data
msg:
    .ascii    "Hello world!\n"

I am guessing that the same program using RIP Relative Addressing would be something like:

.text
    .global _start

_start:
    mov $0xd, %rdx

    mov msg(%rip), %rsi
    pushq $0x1
    pop %rax
    mov %rax, %rdi
    syscall

    xor %rdi, %rdi
    pushq $0x3c
    pop %rax
    syscall

msg:
    .ascii    "Hello world!\n"

The normal version runs fine when compiled with:

as -o hello.o hello.s && ld -s -o hello hello.o && ./hello

But I can’t get the RIP version working.

Any ideas?

— edit —-

Stephen Canon’s answer makes the RIP version work.

Now when I disassemble the executable of the RIP version I get:

objdump -d hello

0000000000400078 <.text>:
  400078: 48 c7 c2 0d 00 00 00  mov    $0xd,%rdx
  40007f: 48 8d 35 10 00 00 00  lea    0x10(%rip),%rsi        # 0x400096
  400086: 6a 01                 pushq  $0x1
  400088: 58                    pop    %rax
  400089: 48 89 c7              mov    %rax,%rdi
  40008c: 0f 05                 syscall 
  40008e: 48 31 ff              xor    %rdi,%rdi
  400091: 6a 3c                 pushq  $0x3c
  400093: 58                    pop    %rax
  400094: 0f 05                 syscall 
  400096: 48                    rex.W
  400097: 65                    gs
  400098: 6c                    insb   (%dx),%es:(%rdi)
  400099: 6c                    insb   (%dx),%es:(%rdi)
  40009a: 6f                    outsl  %ds:(%rsi),(%dx)
  40009b: 20 77 6f              and    %dh,0x6f(%rdi)
  40009e: 72 6c                 jb     0x40010c
  4000a0: 64 21 0a              and    %ecx,%fs:(%rdx)

Which shows what I was trying to accomplish: lea 0x10(%rip),%rsi loads the address 17 bytes after the lea instruction which is address 0x400096 where the Hello world string can be found and thus resulting in position independent code.

Answer 1

I believe that you want to load the address of your string into %rsi; your code attempts to load a quadword from that address rather than the address itself. You want:

lea msg(%rip), %rsi

if I’m not mistaken. I don’t have a linux box to test on, however.