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I am reversing ARM Thumb2 code.

I am looking for a table that shows which registers are used to pass arguments to functions, and which registers must be saved after the function ends.

By the way, if I see push r5-r9 at the beginning of the function and pop r5-r9 at the end of function, are those registers saved?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This is all documented in the ARM Architecture Procedure Call Standard (AAPCS) ARM IHI0042. There may be more recent versions. The short version: R0-R3 are for passing arguments, R12 is a scratch register for procedure calls (linker things, etc) and everything else must be preserved by functions that use it.

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    Do you have a link to the Arm Procedure Call Standard (AAPCS) Arm IHI 0042F doc? I would like to take a look at it
    – julian ♦
    Nov 10, 2018 at 3:30
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Typically, the push r5-r9 instruction is a way to save the content of these registers (ie r5, r6, r7, r8, r9) on the stack, then the pop r5-r9 is restoring the saved values before leaving the function stack-frame.

This is quite common behavior when you want to manipulate non-volatile registers within your stack-frame and be compliant to the ABI. It is extremely frequent to see these way of doing in compiler generated assembly code.

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  • So are these typically the registers used to pass arguments to a function (first part of the question!)?
    – 0xC0000022L ♦
    Jun 15, 2018 at 18:54
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    It depends of the ABI, the question is not precise enough to answer properly. We need to know the OS used (and thus the ABI used).
    – perror
    Jun 15, 2018 at 19:04
  • @perror, I talking about embbeded without os
    – Keystone
    Jun 16, 2018 at 19:04

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