Computer Engineering

x86 Assembly Exercise #1: Toy kill Program (Solution)

Max Headroom 2025.07.20 2 min read

This is a short video as part of our series on x86-64 assembly. If you have not been following the series, you can start with the series overview.

In this video post we will be discussing the solution to the homework exercise I gave at the end of the post on system calls. The objective of the exercise was as follows:

Write a toy implementation of the kill command with a few simplifications
- Hard code the process id to the pid of any running process on your system
- Hard code the signal number to 9 (for SIGKILL)
- Exit the program with the return value of the kill system call

If you are yet to try out this exercise for yourself, then I highly recommend that you do it on your own and then come back to this video to verify your solution.

My aim with such exercises is to give you a taste of systems programming along with teaching assembly. With this combined knowledge of assembly and how things work under the hood, you will be well placed to tackle serious projects in higher-level languages such as C, Rust, Go, Java, etc.

As always, feel free to comment here or reach out to me on email if you have any questions.

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