9.26.8 Directive to mark data as an instruction

The .insn directive tells as that the following data is actually instructions. This makes a difference in MIPS 16 and microMIPS modes: when loading the address of a label which precedes instructions, as automatically adds 1 to the value, so that jumping to the loaded address will do the right thing.

The .global and .globl directives supported by as will by default mark the symbol as pointing to a region of data not code. This means that, for example, any instructions following such a symbol will not be disassembled by objdump as it will regard them as data. To change this behavior an optional section name can be placed after the symbol name in the .global directive. If this section exists and is known to be a code section, then the symbol will be marked as pointing at code not data. Ie the syntax for the directive is:

.global symbol[ section][, symbol[ section]] ...,

Here is a short example:

        .global foo .text, bar, baz .data
foo:
        nop
bar:
        .word 0x0
baz:
        .word 0x1