GCC: Prohibit use of some registers

If you use global explicit register variables, these will be reserved throughout the compilation unit, and will not be used by the compiler for anything else (it may still be used by the system's libraries, so choose something that will be restored by those). local register variables do not guarantee that your value will be in the register at all times, but only when referenced by code or as an asm operand.

When writing GCC inline assembler, you can specify a "clobber list" - a list of registers that may be overwritten by your inline assembler code. GCC will then do whatever is needed to save and restore data in those registers (or avoid their use in the first place) over the course of the inline asm segment. You can also bind input or output registers to C variables.

For example:

inline unsigned long addone(unsigned long v)
{
    unsigned long rv;
    asm("mov $1, %%eax;"
        "mov %0, %%ebx;"
        "add %%eax, %%ebx"
        : /* outputs */  "b" (rv)
        : /* inputs */   "g" (v) /* select unused general purpose reg into %0 */
        : /* clobbers */ "eax"
       );
}

For more information, see the GCC-Inline-Asm-HOWTO.