.quad expressions ¶For 64-bit architectures, or more generally with any GAS configured to support
64-bit target virtual addresses, this is like ‘.int’, but emitting 64-bit
quantities. Otherwise .quad expects zero or more bignums, separated by
commas. For each item, it emits an 8-byte integer. If a bignum won’t fit in
8 bytes, a warning message is printed and just the lowest order 8 bytes of the
bignum are taken.
The term “quad” comes from contexts in which a “word” is two bytes; hence quad-word for 8 bytes.
Note - this directive is not intended for encoding instructions, and it will
not trigger effects like DWARF line number generation. Instead some targets
support special directives for encoding arbitrary binary sequences as
instructions such as .insn or .inst.