Reference no: EM133626877

Part 1: Creating a Procedure that Uses a Stack Frame When we first learned how to create procedures, we used registers to hold the procedures' parameters and return values. While this can potentially be very efficient, it also frequently requires that we preserve the registers' values on the stack to prevent losing data. Saving these values onto the stack usually negates any efficiency that we would have otherwise gained, to it's usually better to just embrace the stack fully and not use registers at all. A stack frame is a small portion of the stack that is set aside for a procedure call. This area contains all of the data we have already been saving to the stack (the return address and preserved registers) as well as any other passed arguments and local variables. We can create a stack frame using the following steps: Push all arguments onto the stack directly instead of placing them in registers Call the procedure (this pushes the return address onto the stack Push EBP onto the stack to preserve its value Set EBP equal to ESP. EBP now serves as our stack frame pointer, which we'll be using to reference our stack frame values.