Understanding cpu registers

Question

I'm very beginner in assembly language and trying to understand how these all work. My question may seem very dumb but anyway, it's not quite clear to me.

Consider the following simple program:

section .text
    global _start

_start:

    mov eax, [text]
    mov [val], eax
    mov ecx, val
    mov eax, 4
    mov edx, 7
    mov ebx, 1
    int 0x80

    mov eax, 1
    int 0x80

segment .bss
    val resb 2

segment .data
    text db "Th"
    len equ $- text

Here we update values in registers and print it out with system call. But I'm wondering what if OS (I'm using Ubuntu 16.04) schedules some process on the same core. It means the process updates CPU registers in its own way. How does OS linux handle it? I mean each process has its own consistent registers value and not affected by some another process?

Basile Starynkevitch Basile Starynkevitch · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-29T10:50:03

When the kernel is running, it keeps somewhere (in kernel memory) a backup of the register contents of the current task (on many processors, there might be some machine instruction or hardware mechanism to help that).

When the kernel runs the scheduler and it choose to run some task, that register state is restored. Notice that Linux has preemptive scheduling. Read about context switching and interrupts and CPU modes. Try several times cat /proc/interrupts in a terminal. See proc(5) for more about /proc/. Read more about x86-64.

When that task asks (e.g. via some system call) to run, the kernel starts by backing up the register contents.

Read Operating Systems : Three Easy Pieces (freely downloadable book).

Each process has, from the point of view of user-space code, its register content, its set of file descriptors, its virtual address space etc... (and the kernel, including its scheduler, is managing all that). For multi-threaded processes, every thread has its register content (but they share some state - notably virtual address space, file descriptors, etc... - with other threads in the same process).

Understanding cpu registers

2 Answers