GNU Assembler in Windows Subsystem for Linux fail - gcc

Question

I would like to compile "Hello World" in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WLS) with Debian.
.text
.global _start
_start:
movl $len,%edx
movl $msg,%ecx
movl $1,%ebx
movl $4,%eax
int $0x80
movl $0,%ebx
movl $1,%eax
int $0x80
.data
msg:
.ascii "Hello, world!\n"
len = . - msg
If i compile in a Debian server with
gcc -nostdlib -o hello hello.s
It work, but in WLS return error
/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/cciVVddg.o: relocation R_X86_64_32 against `.data' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Nonrepresentable section on output collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
I also tried
gcc -fPIC -nostdlib -o hello hello.s

Answer 1

There are two problems with your code:
your code is intended to be 32 bit code but gcc tries to assemble it as 64 bit code. You can fix this by passing -m32 in all stages of assembly and linkage. Please keep in mind that WSL does not actually support 32 bit code so you won't be able to run your program even if you manage to assemble it.
gcc tries to generate a position-indepentent executable. To make your code work in such an executable, you need to write position indepentent code. To do so, you need to avoid any absolute references to the addresses of variables. In 32 bit code, this is a bit tricky and I'm not going to explain this further as 32 bit code won't run on WSL anyway. The compiler advises you to compile with -fpic because that causes the compiler to generate position independent code from C files, but for assembly files it's ineffective. You can fix this issue by linking with -no-pie, causing the linker to generate a normal position-dependent binary. Note that this still doesn't mean that a 32 bit binary is going to run in WSL.