6.45.3.4. Constraints for Particular Machines

6.45.3.4 Constraints for Particular Machines

Whenever possible, you should use the general-purpose constraint letters in asm arguments, since they will convey meaning more readily to people reading your code. Failing that, use the constraint letters that usually have very similar meanings across architectures. The most commonly used constraints are ‘m’ and ‘r’ (for memory and general-purpose registers respectively; see Simple Constraints), and ‘I’, usually the letter indicating the most common immediate-constant format.

Each architecture defines additional constraints. These constraints are used by the compiler itself for instruction generation, as well as for asm statements; therefore, some of the constraints are not particularly useful for <