Provided code: lab3.zip.

GDB and C

Last week, you saw using GDB (specifically the gdbtui interface) to inspect running assembly code. This week, we will repeat the process with C code. The included traceable.c program contains a few interesting functions you can examine.

You may want to look at a video introducing the basics of GDB and assembly or the brief GDB Intro.

As with the assembly code last week, before you compile the code, add a comment around the factorial and to_base functions with your name and student number. Then, compile and include the -g option on the command line to include debugging info in the object/executable file.

gcc -Wall -Wpedantic -std=c17 -march=haswell -g traceable.c

Then, start the executable in gdbtui and trace the execution of one or both of the functions. Some things that might be interesting to see:

• backtrace when factorial is deep in its recursion
• watch c or watch v in the to_base function to see how the string representation is built.
• print (char*)pos in to_base to see the string representation (partially) built.

Take a screenshot showing your gdbtui session with…

• the comment with your name visible in the top half of the gdbtui window,
• the code paused mid-execution (the current line should be highlighted),
• a breakpoint set (b+ or B+ beside a line of code),
• one of the above "interesting" things displayed in the lower pane of the window.

Crop the screenshot within reason and submit it.

Conditional Branching in Assembly

For this week's lab, you will write several assembly function in lab3.S to get some practice with conditional branching (and status flags).

A provided lab3.h provides headers for these functions, and details of the argument/return types. The provided tests.c provides test cases for each of these functions. This code should compile, assemble, link, and run the code:

gcc -Wall -Wpedantic -std=c17 -march=haswell -c helpers.c tests.c \
&& as --warn -g lab3.S -o lab3.o \
&& gcc lab3.o helpers.o tests.o \
&& ./a.out

Absolute Value

Write a function abs_value that takes one (signed integer) argument and (using a conditional branch) returns the absolute value of the argument: the argument unchanged if it's positive and negated if it's negative.

There is an instruction neg that takes one integer operand and negates it.

Powers of Two

Write a function power2 that takes one (unsigned integer) argument (n) and prints (using print_uint64 from helpers.c, included in the ZIP file) each the powers of 2 from 1 to 2ⁿ. You can double a number by adding it to itself: no need to multiply here.

For example, if the argument is 2, the output should be:

1
2
4

Hailstone Sequence Length

You may have seen the hailstone sequence before (or heard of the Collatz Conjecture). The idea is to take an integer n and if it's even, the next value is n/2; if it's odd, the next value is 3n+1. It seems like iterating this calculation eventually hits 1 for all starting points.

Write a function hailstone_length that takes one (unsigned) integer argument, and returns the number of steps before the sequence hits one from that starting point. Here is some pseudocode for the operation (which is also Python code):

def hailstone_length(n):
    length = 0
    while n != 1:
        length += 1
        if (n & 1) == 0:  # if n is even
            n = n // 2    # // is Python integer division
        else:
            n = 3*n + 1
    return length

Hints:

• Use the imul instruction to multiply by 3: imul $3, %rxx.
• To do the division by two, you don't have to actually divide. This instruction will divide %rdi by two, rounding down for odd numbers: "shr $1, %rdi". (If that's mysterious: we'll talk about integer representation soon.)
• You don't have to divide to decide if a number is even: doing a bitwise-AND with one will give 0 for an even number and 1 for an odd number. The and instruction actually does a bitwise-AND of its two arguments, so and $1, %rdi will set ZF for even numbers, so you can then do jz or jnz to check for even-ness. (Again, this relies on the way integers are represented with bits, which we'll talk about later.)

Submit

Submit your work to Lab 3 in CourSys.