Homework 4 System Skill (Term I/2022)
built on 2022/11/13 at 05:15:38 due: Thursday, November 24th @ 11:59pm
This assignment will give you practice with manipulating bits, two’s complement integers, and basic
assembly. You will write some code and hand it in.
Hand-in Instructions
To submit this assignment, please follow the steps below:
1. Log-in to Syskill using your Mahidol ID (i.e., uXXXXXX).
2. The files to hand in are
bits.c
disas.c
Zip up all the files as a4.zip
3. Find out the MD5 hash of your zip file. You will need to submit this code on Canvas. We use it for
keeping track of your submission time. You may resubmit your work but the MD5 hash has to
match.
> md5sum a4.zip
4. Copy the zip file to the directory /handin/a4/u5712345 where u5712345 is your student ID.
> cp a4.zip /handin/a4/u5712345
5. Log on to Canvas, go to assignment 4submission page and enter the MD5 hash.
Homework 4 System Skill
1 Datalab (63 points)
The purpose of this assignment is to become more familiar with bit-level representations of integers
and floating point numbers. You’ll do this by solving a series of programming “puzzles.” Many of these
puzzles are quite artificial, but you’ll find yourself thinking much more about bits in working your way
through them.
For this lab to work properly, you’ll need a Linux system. We recommend using the syskill machine.
1.1 Handout Instructions
You will need a starter package, which ships in the form of a tar file. On syskill, you can find handout.zip
at
/handout/a4/handout.zip
Start by copying datalab-handout.tar to a (protected) directory on a Linux machine in which
you plan to do your work. Then give the command
unix> unzip handout.zip
This will cause a number of files to be unpacked in the directory. The only file you will be modifying and
turning in is bits.c.
The bits.c file contains a skeleton for each of the 10 programming puzzles. Your assignment is
to complete each function skeleton using only straightline code for the integer puzzles (i.e., no loops
or conditionals) and a limited number of C arithmetic and logical operators. Specifically, you are only
allowed to use the following eight operators:
! ~ & ^ | + << >>
A few of the functions further restrict this list. Also, you are not allowed to use any constants longer than
8 bits. See the comments in bits.c for detailed rules and a discussion of the desired coding style.
1.2 The Puzzles
This section describes the puzzles that you will be solving in bits.c.
1.2.1 Bit Manipulations
Table 1 describes a set of functions that manipulate and test sets of bits. The “Rating” field gives the
difficulty rating (the number of points) for the puzzle, and the “Max ops” field gives the maximum
number of operators you are allowed to use to implement each function. See the comments in bits.c
for more details on the desired behavior of the functions. You may also refer to the test functions
in tests.c. These are used as reference functions to express the correct behavior of your functions,
although they don’t satisfy the coding rules for your functions.
1.2.2 Two’s Complement Arithmetic
Table 2 describes a set of functions that make use of the two’s complement representation of integers.
Again, refer to the comments in bits.c and the reference versions in tests.c for more information.
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Homework 4 System Skill
Name Description Rating Max Ops
bitAnd(x,y) Implement x & y using only ~ and | 1 8
getByte(x,n) Extract byte n from word x 2 6
leastBitPos(x) Compute a mask marking the least significant 1 bit. 2 6
negate(x) Compute -x 2 5
logicalShift(x,n) Shift right logical. 3 20
isAsciiDigit(x) Checks if x represents an ascii digit 3 15
bitCount(x) Count the number of 1’s in x. 4 40
bang(x) Compute !n without using ! operator. 4 12
Table 1: Bit-Level Manipulation Functions.
Name Description Rating Max Ops
tmin() Most negative two’s complement integer 1 4
divpwr2(x,n) Compute x/(2^n) 2 15
fitsBits(x,n) Checks if x fits in n bits 2 15
isLessOrEqual(x,y) x <= y? 3 24
isPositive(x) x > 0? 3 8
Table 2: Arithmetic Functions
1.3 Evaluation
Your score will be computed out of a maximum of 63 points based on the following distribution:
32 Correctness points.
26 Performance points.
5 Style points.
Correctness points. The 13 puzzles you must solve have been given a difficulty rating between 1 and
4, such that their weighted sum totals to 32. We will evaluate your functions using the btest program,
which is described in the next section. You will get full credit for a puzzle if it passes all of the tests
performed by btest, and no credit otherwise.
Performance points. Our main concern at this point in the course is that you can get the right
answer. However, we want to instill in you a sense of keeping things as short and simple as you can.
Furthermore, some of the puzzles can be solved by brute force, but we want you to be more clever. Thus,
for each function we’ve established a maximum number of operators that you are allowed to use for
each function. This limit is very generous and is designed only to catch egregiously inefficient solutions.
You will receive two points for each correct function that satisfies the operator limit.
Style points. Finally, we’ve reserved 5 points for a subjective evaluation of the style of your solu-
tions and your commenting. Your solutions should be as clean and straightforward as possible. Your
comments should be informative, but they need not be extensive.
Autograding your work
We have included some autograding tools in the handout directory — btest, dlc, and driver.pl — to
help you check the correctness of your work.
• btest: This program checks the functional correctness of the functions in bits.c. To build and
use it, type the following two commands:
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Homework 4 System Skill
unix> make
unix> ./btest
Notice that you must rebuild btest each time you modify your bits.c file.
You’ll find it helpful to work through the functions one at a time, testing each one as you go. You
can use the -f flag to instruct btest to test only a single function:
unix> ./btest -f bitAnd
You can feed it specific function arguments using the option flags -1, -2, and -3:
unix> ./btest -f bitAnd -1 7 -2 0xf
Check the file README for documentation on running the btest program.
• dlc: This is a modified version of an ANSI C compiler from the MIT CILK group that you can use
to check for compliance with the coding rules for each puzzle. The typical usage is:
unix> ./dlc bits.c
The program runs silently unless it detects a problem, such as an illegal operator, too many
operators, or non-straightline code in the integer puzzles. Running with the -e switch:
unix> ./dlc -e bits.c
causes dlc to print counts of the number of operators used by each function. Type ./dlc -help
for a list of command line options.
1.4 Advice
• Don’t include the <stdio.h> header file in your bits.c file, as it confuses dlc and results in
some non-intuitive error messages. You will still be able to use printf in your bits.c file for
debugging without including the <stdio.h> header, although gcc will print a warning that you
can ignore.
• The dlc program enforces a stricter form of C declarations than is the case for C++ or that is
enforced by gcc. In particular, any declaration must appear in a block (what you enclose in curly
braces) before any statement that is not a declaration. For example, it will complain about the
following code:
int foo(int x)
{
int a = x;
a *= 3; /* Statement that is not a declaration */
int b = a; /* ERROR: Declaration not allowed here */
}
2 Basic disassembly (37 points)
Your final task is to pick apart a binary-encoded x86-64 machine instruction and print its human-
readable assembly equivalent. This is the job of a disassembler (the inverse of the assembler), such as
the objdump tool or the gdb disassemble command. The instructions you must decode are the five
variants of the pushq instruction shown in the table below.
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Homework 4 System Skill
Disassembled Variant (what is pushed?) Binary-encoded machine instruction In hex
instruction (num bytes in parens)
pushq $0x3f10 immediate constant 01101000 00010000 00111111 68 10 3f 00 00
00000000 00000000 (5)
pushq %rbx register 01010011 (1) 53
pushq (%rdx) indirect 11111111 00110010 (2) ff 32
pushq 0x8(%rax) indirect with displacement 11111111 01110000 00001000 (3) ff 70 08
pushq indirect with displacement 11111111 01110100 10001101 ff 74 8d ff
0xff(%rbp,%rcx,4) and scaled-index 11111111 (4)
As we discussed in class, x86-64 uses a variable-length encoding for machine instructions; some
instructions are encoded as a single byte, and others require more than a dozen bytes. The pushq
instructions to be decoded vary from 1 to 5 bytes in length. The first byte of a machine instruction
contains the opcode which indicates the type of instruction. The opcode is followed by 0 or more
additional bytes that encode additional details about the instruction such as the operands, register
selector, displacement and so on. This additional bytes vary based on the particular instruction variant.
The table above shows various pushq assembly instructions, each with its binary-encoded machine
equivalent. To interpret the binary encoding:
• The black bits identify the opcode and instruction variant. They are constant for all instructions
of a given variant type.
• The red, green, and blue bits vary depending on chosen register, amount of displacement, and
immediate values.
• The red bits used in register/indirect come in groups of 3. It takes 3 bits to select a register from
the lower 8 registers. The selected register is encoded using the mapping:
%rax=000 %rcx=001 %rdx=010 %rbx=011 %rsp=100 %rbp=101 %rsi=110 %rdi=111.
Note in the third byte of the scaled-index variant there are two register selectors side-by-side. The
left group of three bits encodes the register for the index, the right group encodes the register for
the base address. (To access any of the upper 8 registers, a different instruction encoding is used
that you are not responsible for disassembling)
• The blue bits encode the scale factor for the scaled-index variant. The legal values for the scale
are {1, 2, 4, 8}, thus 2 bits are required to encode a scale factor. The values are encoded with the bit
patterns 00,01,10,11 respectively.
• The green bits encode an unsigned value of size 1-byte (displacement) or 4-byte (immediate).
The 4-byte immediate is stored in little-endian order.
2.1 Your Task
You are to implement a function
void disassemble(const unsigned char *raw_instr)
The disassemble function takes a pointer to a sequence of raw bytes that represent a single
machine instruction. How many bytes are used by the instruction is figured out during disassembling.
The idea is to read the first byte(s) and use the opcode and variant to determine how many additional
bytes need to be examined. You may wish to write a helper function print_hex_bytes to print the
raw bytes, then use bitwise manipulation to extract and convert the operands and print the assembly
language instruction.
For constants (immediate or displacement), use the printf format %#x to show hex digits prefixed
with 0x and no leading zeros.
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Homework 4 System Skill
As an example, if the disassemble function were passed a pointer to the bytes for the last instruction
in the table above, it would print this line of output:
ff 74 8d ff pushq 0xff(%rbp,%rcx,4)
We will only test your function on well-formed instructions of the 5 pushq variants listed above.
There is no requirement that you gracefully handle any other inputs, such as other variants of push or
other instruction types or malformed inputs.
For slightly obscure reasons, there is a slight anomaly in the encoding used when %rbp or %rsp is
the base register in indirect/indirect-with-displacement or %rsp as the index register for scaled-index.
You do not need to allow for this nor make a special case for it, just disassemble as though the standard
encoding is used for all registers without exceptions.
2.2 Logistics & Advice
Your implementation will go inside disas.c. The file disas.c must not contain any main function.
You may wish to write a separate file to test your implementation.
Design/style/readability. Bitwise manipulation is known for its obscurity, so take extra care to keep
the code clean and be sure to comment any dense expressions. Use macro wisely.
