Hello All, The following is a line in rtems' timer driver source. asm volatile(".byte 0x0F, 0x31" : "=A" (result)); RTEMS mailing list clarified me saying that it is encoding of pentium rdtsc instruction. Please tell me how the above statement differs from the one below. asm("rdtsc result"); (Assuming the instruction mnemonic is correct) Only thing I found from gnu documentation for gcc that '=' specifies that result is a output of the instruction. According to the document, there must be an instruction pnemonic string first inside the paranthesis. But there is the directive .byte there. Does this mean the opcode directly? The document also says that the arguments can be referred like %0, %1 etc. But there is nothing like this here. Is it because, since there is only one operand, it is assumed to follow the opcode? Any other reference than info pages of gcc provides more details? Please clear my doubts. With Best Regards Srinivasan ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Insurance Special: Be informed on the best policies, services, tools and more. Go to: http://in.insurance.yahoo.com/licspecial/index.html