Shift Operations

Basic Shift

There are several different kinds of shift operations in Assembly. The most basic ones are shr, sar, shl and sal. The last bit shifted out is stored in the carry flag.

Operator	Usage	Description
`shr`	`shr eax, [n]`	Shift Right: Shifts the bits in `eax` by n bits. Same as `eax = eax / 2^n`. As long as the sign bit is not changed by the shift, the result will be correct.
`shl`	`shl eax, [n]`	Shifts Left: Shifts the bits in `eax` by n bits. Same as `eax = eax * 2^n`. As long as the sign bit is not changed by the shift, the result will be correct.
`sal`	`sal eax, [n]`	Shift Arithmetic Left: Same as `shl`. As long as the sign bit is not changed by the shift, the result will be correct.
`sar`	`sar eax, [n]`	Shift Arithmetic Right: Shifts by n bits to the right. Sign bit is not shifted. Equals to `eax = eax / 2^n` for signed values.

Rotate Shift

The rotate shift instructions are pretty much like logical shifts except that bits shifted off one end of the data are shifted in on the other side. Thus, the data is treated like in a circular structure. The two simplest rotate instructions are ror and ror which make left and right rotations. The shifted bit is stored in the carry flag.

Additionally, there are rcr and rcl instructions which treat the carry flag as a single bit extension of the actual value and rotate the value and the carry flag.

Example

This code example is taken and edited from the PC Assembly Book in such a way that it can be called within C as a function like int32_t countActiveBits(int32_t numToRotate).

countActiveBits.asm

segment .text
global countActiveBits

countActiveBits:
    mov edx, [esp + 4]  ; receive number to rotate
    mov eax, 0          ; eax will contain the count of ON bits
    mov ecx, 32         ; ecx is the loop counter, 32-bit register
count_loop:
    shl edx, 1          ; shift bit into carry flag
    JNC skip_inc        ; if CF == 0, goto skip_inc
    INC eax

skip_inc:
    loop count_loop
    ret

or an alternative (suggested) way would be:

countActiveBits-aslt.asm

segment .text
global countActiveBits

countActiveBits:
    mov edx, [esp + 4]  ; receive number to rotate
    mov eax, 0          ; ebx will contain the count of ON bits
    mov ecx, 32         ; ecx is the loop counter
count_loop:
    shl edx, 1          ; shift bit into carry flag
    adc eax, 0          ; add only the carry flag to eax
    loop count_loop ; loop
    ret

CAUTION: Make sure the inserted and returned values are 32-bit values. If the return type required a 64-bit value, EDX:EAX would be returned and that would result in a wrong return unless xor edx, edx is inserted before returning.

NOTE: As only EAX, ECX and EDX are changed, entering the function as well as any pop instructions are not necessary.