Goals and Syllabus
Course Description
From the course catalogue:
CSE 351: The Hardware/Software Interface (4) - Examines key computational abstraction levels below modern high-level languages; number representation, assembly language, introduction to C, memory management, the operating-system process model, high-level machine architecture including the memory hierarchy, and how high-level languages are implemented. Prerequisite: CSE 143.
Course Goals
This course should develop students’ sense of “what really happens” when software runs — and that this question can be answered at several levels of abstraction, including the hardware architecture level, the assembly level, the C programming level and the Java programming level. The core around which the course is built is C, assembly, and low-level data representation, but this is connected to higher levels (roughly how basic Java could be implemented), lower levels (the general structure of a processor), and the role of the operating system (but not how the operating system is implemented).
For (computer science) students wanting to specialize at higher levels of abstraction, this could in the extreme be the only course they take that considers the “C level” and below. However, most will take a subset of Systems Programming, Hardware Design and Implementation, Operating Systems, Compilers, etc.
For students interested in hardware, embedded systems, computer engineering, computer architecture, etc., this course is the introductory course after which other courses will delve both deeper (into specific topics) and lower (into hardware implementation, circuit design, etc.).
Course Syllabus
Approximate Topic List
Note that even more important than the topics at various levels of abstraction is the connection between them: students should get an informal sense of how Java could be translated to C, C to assembly, and assembly to binary.
Weeks are approximate; they are particularly useful for identifying topics that are essential for “connecting the pieces” yet which do not command a large portion of the class (e.g., Java-to-C). The order of presentation depends on instructor preference. There are arguments for “top down” (they already know Java), for “bottom up” (understand what’s going on below), or starting with C (useful for homeworks).
- Number representation: Two’s complement, signed vs. unsigned, floating point (1 week)
- Assembly (2 weeks)
- Memory vs. registers
- Instruction format
- Control structures in assembly (loops, procedure calls)
- C (2 weeks)
- Pointers, arrays, strings
- Memory management, malloc/free, stack vs. heap
- structs
- Compilation, linking, libraries (code across multiple files) (less than 1 week)
- The process model (what the operating system provides, not how
it provides it) (1 week)
- Virtualization and isolation (including virtual memory)
- Components of a process state and notion of a context switch
- System calls for accessing shared resources and communication channels
- Asynchronous signals
- High-level machine architecture (1 week)
- Register file
- Instruction cycle
- Caching and the memory hierarchy
- The Java-to-C connection (1 week)
- Representing an object as pointer to struct with pointer to method-table; performing a method call
- Constructors as malloc-then-initialize
- Garbage collection via reachability from the stack
- Java array-bounds-checking via array-size fields
- Parallelism/multicore/pthreads (less than 1 week)