Igor’s Tip of the Week #144: Macros and simplified instructions

Many processors (especially RISC based) use instruction sets with fixed size (most commonly 4 bytes). Among examples are ARM, PPC, MIPS and a few others. This is also obvious in the disassembly when observing the instructions’ addresses – they increase by a fixed amount:

However, occasionally you may come across larger instructions:

What is this? Does A64 ISA have 8-byte instructions?

In fact, if you check ARM’s documentation, you’ll discover that ADRL is a pseudo-instruction which generates two machine …

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