Computer Systems Programming

Instructor: Wu-chang Feng
Office hours: here
TA: Christopher Chak (OdinID=chak)
TA Office hours: MW 2pm-3:50pm (Outside of FAB 120)
Resources
Required textbooks
  • Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3rd ed., Bryant and O'Hallaron, Prentice Hall, 2015. ISBN-13: 978-0134092669.
  • The C Programming Language, 2nd ed., Kernighan and Ritchie, Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-110362-8.
Recommended textbooks
  • The C Book M. Doran. GB Direct on-line book.
  • SEI CERT C Coding Standard CERT, on-line site.

Schedule

Date Topic (Reading) Slides Assignment
1/10 Introduction, The C Programming Language (K/R Ch 1-4) Slides
Slides
A1
1/12 The C Library, GDB (B/O Ch1, Ch 7, K/R Ch 7) Slides  
1/17 Computer System Organization (to ELF) (B/O Ch 7) Slides
1/19 Computer System Organization (B/O Ch 7)
Data Representation (to hex) (B/O Ch 2.1-2.2)
Slides A1 Due
Submission instructions
MetaCTF assignment
1/24 Data Representation (B/O Ch 2.1-2.2)

1/26 Floating Point and Arithmetic (B/O Ch 2.3-2.5) Slides
1/31 x86 Basics (B/O Ch 3.1-3.5) Slides A2 Due
Submission instructions
2/2 Midterm Exam (K/R Ch 1-4,7, B/O Ch 1-2,7)
Sample | Sample solution | Practice | Practice site
2/7
x86 Control Flow (B/O Ch 3.6) Slides
2/9 x86 Procedures (to func_ptrs)  (B/O Ch 3.7, K/R Ch. 5.11-5.12) Slides
2/14 x86 Stack Overflow (B/O Ch 3.10)

2/16 x86 Arrays (B/O Ch. 3.8 K&R Ch. 5.1-5.10) Slides
2/21 x86 Structures, Embedded Assembly, ARM (B/O Ch. 3.9, K&R Ch 6) Slides
Slides

2/23 Program optimization (B/O Ch 5) Slides
2/28 Program optimization - SIMD (B/O Ch 3.11)
Cache memories (B/O Ch 6)
Slides
Slides

3/2
Cache memories (B/O Ch 6) Slides
3/7 Cache memories (B/O Ch 6)
Exceptional control flow (B/O Ch 8)
Slides A3 Due
Submission instructions
3/9 Exceptional control flow Slides
3/14 Advanced topics Habit slides
C/Rust slides
A4 Due
3/16 Advanced topics
3/20 Monday
(10:15am-12:05pm)
Final Exam (K/R Ch 5,6, B/O Ch 3, 5, 6, 8)   MetaCTF levels due
Final Practice
FinalReviewQs | FinalReviewSolutions | Screencast

Policies

Grading
A1 (C/libc) 5%
A2 (bit ops/floats) 10%
A3 (asm,SIMD) 5%
A4 (caching) 5%
MetaCTF 20%
Attendance 10%
Midterm 20%
Final 25%
Assignments
  • Due at the beginning of class
  • Docked 10% for each day late up to 5 days.
  • Not accepted after 5 days late
Exams
  • In class
  • Closed book
  • Closed notes
  • No electronics

Academic integrity
  • All assigned work is to be completed individually
  • For assignments, source code plagiarism tools will check that code has not been duplicated
  • Ensure your code is kept private
Academic misconduct
  • Includes allowing another student to copy your work
  • Includes copying blocks of code from external sources without proper attribution
  • Results in a grade of 0 for the assignment or exam
  • Forwarded to the university for disciplinary action.

Course objectives

  • Describe basic computer system organization including the operating system (processes, files, virtual memory) and the underlying hardware (CPU, registers, memory hierarchy).
  • Describe the compilation system (preprocessing, assembling, compiling, and linking) and the function of object/executable files and shared libraries, as well as how basic system utilities such as debuggers and Makefiles work.
  • Write C programs to illustrate basic systems programming concepts, including file I/O, system calls, memory management, exception handling and process management.
  • Do arithmetic in hexadecimal, decimal, octal, and binary notation, and convert among these notations.
  • Explain how data types such as integers, characters, floating point numbers, arrays, pointers, and structures are represented
  • Describe the basic instruction set architecture for the Intel x86 family (or similar machine), including the arithmetic/logic instructions, registers, memory model and addressing, and control instructions.
  • Explain how high-level programming constructs such as loops and stack-based function calls are implemented in underlying machine code.
  • Explain how exceptions, traps, and context switches occur and how they are handled at the machine level.
  • Explain the performance impact of hardware features such as pipelining, and architecture principles such as memory locality.
  • Understand and identify performance bottlenecks in C programs.