CS 352 TA Homepage

Welcome to my brief homepage for CS 352. Announcements, homework hints, etc. may appear here.

The weekly discussion session occurs on Wednesday from 3-4 PM in Painter 3.20. We introduce homework problems and labs, discuss questions from you (the students), and review test material. It is to your advantage to look at the homework ahead of time so you can ask good questions. It is to your disadvantage to wait until the last minute and rely on me to address your issue.

My office hours consist of Monday 10-10:50 on the 20th floor of the tower and the Wednesday discussion session. Please feel free to contact me and setup an additional meeting time if your schedule requires it or you need some random help. I am more pleased to help you when you have started ahead of time, but I'm around to help, so ask anyway.

The class website is: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/hunt/class/2006-fall/cs352/cs352.html

Goto http://www.utexas.edu/its/usenet/extnews for information on accessing the newsgroup: utexas.class.cs352-hunt.

Homework Solutions Discussion Notes

Test #4 (Final)

*Correction*
Date/Time: Tuesday, December 19, 9AM - 12 Noon
Location: PAI 3.14

Review Sheet

Test #3

Review Sheet

Homework #8 Hints

This assignment is relatively straightforward.

• 5.11:
  • Part A -- this is like slide 10 from "Class 10" notes (class11.pdf).
  • Part B -- remember that sum accumulates the answer.
  • Part C -- you *must* assume that there are only two integer functional units.
  • Part D -- you can assume similar assembly, and that there are two floating point functional units.
• 5.14: You can assume it takes four cycles to do an integer multiplication, and that you have two integer functional units.
• 5.15: You can probably compile this to assembly using GCC and then modify the assembly to use the conditional move instruction.
• 5.16: What question does this remind you of? It reminds me of 3.32.

Homework #7 Hints

Here's a skeleton for one way of doing 64 bit multiplication. I have a complete version that does work, so it should be helpful. Feel free to send suggestions.64bit-mult.c

Test #2

Review Sheet

Lab #2 Hints

• Look at page 259 in the textbook to see how instructions are laid out.
• Page 261 has branch encodings and register numberings.
• Print a copy of the slides from class 11. Double-sided, two slides per page requires carrying 8 sheets of paper around. I find slide 7 particularly useful when I forget which register is subtracted from the other. Slides
• Your solutions are expected to follow the X86 register usage conventions (AFAIK the Y86 adopts these conventions). See page 173 for an explanation of usage conventions.
• How can you access the carry out from an addition? We were initially thinking you could use one of the conditional jumps, but after thinking about it, it seems harder than that. The code from lab1, section addOK, should help. You can and 0x80000000 with each lower word to get the MSB of that word. Then it's just a matter of figuring out what sign beginnings and changes means a carryout occurred.

Homework #6 Hints

Dr. Hunt does a good job describing the problem. Partial credit may be awarded, but you're going to be in much better shape if you actually get it to work. It takes the grader 3 minutes to grade something that works as expected and 15-60 minutes to grade something messed up.

Homework #5 Hints

• 4.32: Like the question says, use figure 4.16 as a guide.
• 4.33: Look for the 6 stages that describe how rrmovl and popl are implemented and combine them. It's cool that you're going to learn how leave works.

Homework #4 Hints

• 3.34: Do this problem in two steps:
  1. Figure out what each switch statement does
  2. Figure out which case is associated with which spot in memory
  Remember: cases can "fall through" to the next case.
• 3.35: This problem is a brain teaser. You will earn credit if you have one less memory access from within the loop.
• 3.36: You can figure out what types a_struct contains by examining n. 4 * 5 equals 20.

• 3.38: This problem is no longer doable since the department's Linux machines randomize the beginning of the stack location. As such, Dr. Hunt and I have decided to not assign the problem as written.

  However, if you do something that demonstrates you understand the stack, how buffers allocated on the stack interact with return addresses, etc., then you can earn some "extra credit." The information must be directly related to a buffer overflow attack. I have no idea how much extra credit you can earn, but it will be more than 0% and less than 20%. It depends on the quality.

• 3.39: Start reading at the bottom of page 226. Keep going through page 229. After you do this five times, the answer should be pretty apparent. Have confidence!

Lab #1 Hints

• FitsBits: Do you understand what fitsbits is asking? Even that took me a moment to figure out. You should probably break it into two scenarios: (1) where x is positive and (2) where x is negative.
• Bang: You should take a hierarchical approach to bang. You'll want to do a shift and then or the shifted bits with the unshifted bits. I'd say more, but it seems unfair to do so so late in the game, after some of your peers have suffered through it.
• IsLess: It's like the test question. You want to do subtraction (compliment and add 1) and cover the cases where x and y have the same signs. Do something similar for different signs.
• Sum3: It looks to me like you'll need to do some fancy XOR'ing and OR'ing. Think about how you actually do an addition. It seems that if you can discover how to add two numbers together hierarchically, that you'll be done, because you can just feed that result in as word0 and z in as word1. However, this advice may be misleading.
• BitCount: Think hierarchy. You have 40 ops! Easy once you realize hierarchy is necessary (and what I mean by hierarchy).
• MultFiveEights: It seems to me that the test cases are correct. The following C-code might clarify the spec for you. Note that I'm telling you nothing new, since the specification above the function says to round to 0. I actually think there's a test case omitted from btest, which makes this problem easier to gain credit. Since btest is the specification, you will gain full credit even if you don't discover this test case.

    int times_five = *SOME SIMPLE SHIFTING MAGIC*;
    int divided_by_eight = *SOME SIMPLE SHIFTING MAGIC*
  
    if (times_five < 0)
  	return divided_by_eight + 1;
    else 
  	return divided_by_eight;	  
  		

Test #1

Review Sheet

Homework 3 Notes

• ASCII Table (includes newline character)
• Goto Section 3.2 of the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual (Instruction Set Reference) for documentation on the Intel x86 32-bit ISA.
• Wikipedia Explanation of Stack

Question Disambiguation

• 3.31: Compile with optimization level 3. Note that if you try to generate an executable you will get a "main doesn't exit" error. Use the command:

  gcc -O3 -S 3.31.c

  My assembly for the solution looks as follows:

  		.file	"3.31.c"
  		.text
  		.p2align 4,,15
  	.globl decode
  		.type	decode, @function
  	decode:
  		pushl	%ebp
  		movl	%esp, %ebp
  		movl	16(%ebp), %ecx
  		movl	12(%ebp), %eax
  		subl	%ecx, %eax
  		movl	8(%ebp), %ecx
  		popl	%ebp
  		imull	%eax, %ecx
  		sall	$31, %eax
  		sarl	$31, %eax
  		xorl	%ecx, %eax
  		ret
  		.size	decode, .-decode
  		.section	.note.GNU-stack,"",@progbits
  		.ident	"GCC: (GNU) 3.3.4"
  		

  Discussion Example Source Discussion Example Assembly

• 3.32: (A)'s simple after you think about it. Part (B) is slightly vague, but if you think about it, you'll discover the answer. Part (C) requires that you understand how goto's work. Example with goto. Part (D) asks about the use of this strategy in general. Why is it safe to use the strategy in this example? What would make this strategy unsafe?
• 3.33: Remember that %eax is the return value in the IA-32 specification. If you don't see a jump, then did the case statement "fall through?" Discussion example source
• 3.37: Note that terminals and the C standard IO library will buffer input by default. The simplest solution involves getchar and putchar. If you want to challenge your knowledge of C, use fgets and puts. If you use these, use a buffer of size 8 bytes (for easy testing). If your program is vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, you will lose points.

Homework 2 Notes

• Floating Point Tip: Learn the meaning of Mantissa/Significand, Exponent, Bias, and Sign bit ahead of time. Refer to figure 2.23 (page 86) and practice problem 2.33 (page 87).
• An easy way to get xFF...FF on a w-bit machine is with the C-expression ~x0.
• Since problem 2.57 is the most abstract, do it last

Question Disambiguation

• 2.50: Here is an example solution for K = 3:

  (x << 1) + x

• 2.51: An example bit sequence for part (A) where w=16 and k=3: 1111 1111 1111 1000. You can assume to be working with a value of type "signed int", with the understanding that the width of the "signed int" will vary. It could be 39 for all you know.
• 2.52: Think about using masks and shifts. You may not reference w since it is not a parameter to the function.
  Hint: Suppose you are given i == 2. Could you get the value 0x00FF0000 by logically shifting xFF left? What operation can you apply to x00FF0000 to give you another value that does not depend on w?
• 2.53: Pretend you have two different architectures. One of these architectures provides a logical right shift but not an arithmetic right shift. The other provides an arithmetic right shift but not a logical right shift. Implement the missing operation for each of these architectures.
• 2.54: These are tautology questions (like in 313k). Look at slide 40 of the Integers lecture for some related puzzles.

• 2.55: When you represent 1/3, k = 2, because "01" repeats infinitely. When you represent 1/5, k = 4, because "0011" repeats infinitely.

  The author gives a hint in English by suggesting shifting x by k. So here's my extension of that hint: What is x >> k equal to? X / expt (2, k). You'll find a variation of this useful for solving parts A and B of the homework. Use part B to test your solution to part A.

• 2.56: There are four cases to consider. Use the standard bit and boolean operators. "|" is an example of a bit operator. "||" is an example of a Boolean operator.
• 2.57: Learn how a 32 bit floating point representation works. Then try (A), (B), and (C) in the IEEE 32-bit floating format. After you have an idea how these numbers are represented, generalize to the variables given in the question.
• 2.59: Do practice problem 2.33 on page 87 before doing this.
• 2.61: This is easy once you understand how denormalized values, normalized values, 0, infinite, and NaN are represented in floating point. Do not attempt this before doing practice problem 2.33.

Homework 1 Notes

• Sun and Linux Machines Listing
• Explanation of Little and Big Endian Wikipedia
• Factorial on my machine yields 1,000 MIPS Explanation of MIPs
• Example Factorial MIPS Calculation Source Assembly

Question Disambiguation

Obviously, for any question that asks you to write code, you have to turn in a printout of the code.

• 2.38: You must run the code on a little endian and big endian architecture.
• 2.39: You must execute the code on 2 different data types. I recommend choosing three or more of the following: int, long, float, double, string. One platform that provides an interesting result (little endian) will suffice.
• 2.40: Look at figure 2.3. Copy and modify the code to create functions show_short, show_long, and show_double. Technically the question asks for more than one machine type, but for me you will earn credit if you do it on an interesting architecture (little endian).
• 2.41: You may want to print 1 sample execution of your program on a little endian machine. Print the code too.
• 2.45: Printing the test cases reduces the chance of my making a mistake against you while grading your paper. If you print, I may give you the benefit of the doubt. If you don't print evidence, I may not give you the benefit of the doubt. It depends on how clear your code is and how smart I am at the time of grading.
• 2.48: There are two ways to earn credit. (1) Give me a full mathematical proof. (2) Do a proof by cases using for the 4-bit 2's compliment number system. This is less than a complete proof but good enough for me.
• Fibonacci: I prefer you calculate the MIPs for otto.cs.utexas.edu, but you can definitely earn full credit if you do it on a different machine.

Related Links

• C/C++ Standard I/O Reference You can access these functions by adding #include <stdio.h> at the top of your file.
• Here's the proper signature for main, and an example use of atoi.
• GDB Quick Reference Card
• Install Cygwin and X Server. You can use these to ssh into the Taylor Linux machines and run emacs/vim and your other favorite applications remotely. Setup Instructions
• Seemingly cool C reference page link

Tips for Responsive Email Communication

1. ALWAYS begin your subject line with "CS 352:", "[CS 352]", or "CS 352 - ".
2. If your email requires action (for example, a reply), place the words "- followup required" at the end of your subject.
3. Formulate your facts and question clearly. It's easier to address a concern that's clearly stated than a mess of words that wander only to arrive at half a question.
4. Use capital letters to being sentences. Write in complete sentences.
5. Address your professors that hold Ph.D. degrees as Dr. ___ and your professors that don't either as Mr. ___ or Professor ___.

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