ARM Compiler armasm User Guide : 21.59 REQUIRE8 and PRESERVE8

21.59 REQUIRE8 and PRESERVE8

The REQUIRE8 and PRESERVE8 directives specify that the current file requires or preserves eight-byte alignment of the stack.

Note:

This directive is required to support non-ABI conforming toolchains. It has no effect on AArch64 assembly and is not required when targeting AArch64.

Syntax

REQUIRE8 {bool}

PRESERVE8 {bool}

where:

bool: is an optional Boolean constant, either {TRUE} or {FALSE}.

Usage

Where required, if your code preserves eight-byte alignment of the stack, use PRESERVE8 to set the PRES8 build attribute on your file. If your code does not preserve eight-byte alignment of the stack, use PRESERVE8 {FALSE} to ensure that the PRES8 build attribute is not set. Use REQUIRE8 to set the REQ8 build attribute. If there are multiple REQUIRE8 or PRESERVE8 directives in a file, the assembler uses the value of the last directive.

The linker checks that any code that requires eight-byte alignment of the stack is only called, directly or indirectly, by code that preserves eight-byte alignment of the stack.

Note:

If you omit both PRESERVE8 and PRESERVE8 {FALSE}, the assembler decides whether to set the PRES8 build attribute or not, by examining instructions that modify the SP. ARM recommends that you specify PRESERVE8 explicitly.

You can enable a warning by using the --diag_warning 1546 option when invoking armasm.

This gives you warnings like:

"test.s", line 37: Warning: A1546W: Stack pointer update potentially breaks 8 byte stack alignment
       37 00000044         STMFD    sp!,{r2,r3,lr}

Examples

REQUIRE8
REQUIRE8     {TRUE}      ; equivalent to REQUIRE8
REQUIRE8     {FALSE}     ; equivalent to absence of REQUIRE8
PRESERVE8    {TRUE}      ; equivalent to PRESERVE8
PRESERVE8    {FALSE}     ; NOT exactly equivalent to absence of PRESERVE8

Related reference

11.21 --diag_warning=tag[,tag,…]

Related information

Eight-byte Stack Alignment

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