A Guide to ARM64 / AArch64 Assembly on Linux with Shellcodes and Cryptography | modexp
The Cortex-A76 codenamed “Enyo” will be the first of three CPU cores from ARM designed to target the laptop market between 2018-2020. ARM already has a monopoly on handheld devices, and are now projected to take a share of the laptop and server market. First, Apple announced in April 2018 its intention to replace Intel with ARM for their Macbook CPU from 2020 onwards. Second, a company called Ampere started shipping a 64-bit ARM CPU for servers in September 2018 that’s intended to compete with Intel’s XEON CPU. Moreover, the Automotive Enhanced (AE) version of the A76 unveiled in the same month will target applications like self-driving cars. The A76 will continue to support A32 and T32 instruction sets, but only for unprivileged code. Privileged code (kernel, drivers, hyper-visor) will only run in 64-bit mode. It’s clear that ARM intends to phase out support for 32-bit code with its A series. Developers of Linux distros have also decided to drop support for all 32-bit architectures, including ARM.
This post is an introduction to ARM64 assembly and will not cover any advanced topics. It will be updated periodically as I learn more, and if you have suggestions on how to improve the content, or you believe something needs correcting, feel free to email me.
