Debugging gcc behavior

While compiling a FreeBSD kernel I encountered the following error message from GNU assembler

Error: suffix or operands invalid for `mov'

I was not sure whether the error is because of my changes are not. But still I have to debug the problem and solve it, so I decided to find what is wrong with the mov instruction. But since gcc created a temporary file and invoked as to assemble it, I couldn’t find the temp file anymore.

Googled and find the following gcc options to find what gcc does.

gcc –v is verbose mode, which prints all the action/scripts gcc is doing.

gcc -### similar to –v but wont execute any commands.

gcc –save-temps saves all the temporary files generated by the gcc. Useful if you want to see the assembly output passed to gnu assembler.

gcc –E Just preprocess the c file

gcc –S generate assembly file.

With gcc –v –save-temps, I got the temporary assembler file used by assembler. Since reading machine generated assembly file is difficult, I tried to find the C source code corresponding to the error. From nearest .file assembler directive I found the C file name and from the .loc directive I found the line number. And the following was the inline assembly in the C file.

__asm __volatile("movl %%ss,%0" : "=rm" (sel));

Was surprised what is wrong with this and why my assembler giving error. Googled again and found this link - http://kerneltrap.org/node/5785. It seems newer gnu assembler(>=2.16) wont support long read/write operations(mov) on segment registers(ds,ss...). So changed the above source to movw %%ss, %o and it compiled perfectly. :)