The Old New Thing

What’s up with the mysterious inc bp in function prologues of 16-bit code?

March 16, 2011 Mar 16, 2011 03/16/11

Raymond Chen

A little while ago, we learned about the EBP chain. The EBP chain in 32-bit code is pretty straightforward because there is only one type of function call. But in 16-bit code there are two types of function calls, the near call and the far call. A near call pushes a 16-bit return address on the stack before branching to the function entry ...