SPO600 Inline Assembler Lab

Purpose of this Lab
This lab is designed to explore the use of inline assembler, and its use in open source software.

Lab 7

References

• Inline Assembly Language
• ARM Information Centre
  • ARM Cortex-A Series Programmer’s Guide for ARMv8-A
• ARMv8 Instruction Set Overview

Part A - Class Lab

1. Here is a version of the volume scaling problem from the Algorithm Selection Lab for AArch64: spo600_20173_inline_assembler_lab.tgz. Download, build, and verify the operation of this program on AArchie.

2. Test the performance of this solution and compare it to your previous solution(s). Adjust the number of samples (in vol.h) to produce a measurable runtime, and adjust your code for comparable test conditions (number of samples, 1 array vs. 2 arrays, and so forth).

3. Find the answers to the questions identified with "Q:" in the comments in the source code.

4. Blog about your results in detail, including your reflections.

Part B - Individual Task

1. Select one of the following open source packages which is not claimed by another person in the class. Put your name beside it in (parenthesis) to claim it.

• amule
• ardour
• avidemux
• blender
• bunny
• busybox
• chicken
• cln
• coq
• cxxtools
• faad2
• fawkes
• gauche
• gmime
• gnash
• gridengine
• groonga (Matthew Marangoni)
• hoard
• iaxclient
• k9copy
• lame
• libfame
• libgcroots
• libmad
• libmlx4
• lightsparc
• mediatomb
• mjpegtools
• mlt
• mosh
• mpich2
• ocaml-zarith
• openblas
• opencore-amr
• openser
• par2cmdline
• picprog
• qlandkartegt
• sooperlooper
• traverso

2. Find the assembler in that software, and determine:

• How much assembley-language code is present
• Which platform(s) it is used on
• Why it is there (what it does)
• What happens on other platforms
• Your opinion of the value of the assembler code VS the loss of portability/increase in complexity of the code.

3. Blog your results in detail.