Course Overview

Course Goals

• Familiarity with machine-level programming, at a level sufficient to understand and modify compiler output, and to write from scratch small programs using assembly.
• Understand binary data representations
  • chars: ASCII/Unicode
  • binary integer representation
  • floating point binary formats
  • machine language instruction design
• Understanding high-level hardware including:
  • memory- and port-mapped I/O
  • interrupts
  • MMUs, memory segmentation
  • memory cache design
• Understand low-level OS-level software design
  • RTS organization
  • Process space layout
• Appreciation of optimization/speed issues, including:
  • avoiding pipeline breaks
  • coding to optimize cache use
  • floating point coprocessors
• Mastery of Unix commandline interface (since we're using Raspberry Pis).

Course Requirements

• Working Raspberry Pi system with Unix
• Basic C experience
  • Ifs, loops, variables, printf, scanf

Course Assignments

• Frequent assignments involving debugging and optimizing assembly code
• In practice, writing very small assembly blocks, or editing/enhancing compiler-generated assembly is more common
• Additional assignments optimizing C code, especially for cache utilization.
• Possible extra credit assignment using CUDA processor