What does an asterisk * before an address mean in x86-64 AT&T assembly?

Question

What does the following line mean:

...
401147: ff 24 c5 80 26 40 00    jmpq   *0x402680(,%rax,8)
...

What does the asterisk in front of the

Answer 1

Minimal example

To make things clearer:

.data
    # Store he address of the label in the data section.
    symbol: .int label   
.text   
    # Jumps to label.
    jmp *symbol
    label:

GitHub upstream.

Without the *, it would jump to the address of symbol in the .data section and segfault.

I feel this syntax is a bit inconsistent, because for most instructions:

mov symbol, %eax
mov label, %eax

already moves the data at the address symbol, and $symbol is used for the address. Intel syntax is more consistent in this point as it always uses [] for dereference.

The * is of course a mnemonic for the C dereference operator *ptr.