I am not familiar with the x86 instruction set, so please can you
explain why it is necessary to have these two different versions of the
nop and why the user has to select one ? ie if the space to be padded
is up to 10 bytes why can't the assembler just use the "short" version
automatically and if it is longer than 10 bytes use the "long" version ?
x86/x86-64 assemblers need to fill the text section from 1 to
15 bytes for alignment. We have simple nop instructions for 1 to
10 bytes. For 11 to 15 bytes, we can add 0x66 prefix repeatedly
to 10 byte nop to get 11-15byte nops. However some processors
prefer simple nops. That is, 3 0x66 prefixes on the 10 byte nop
are slower on those processors than a 6 byte nop + a 7 byte nop.