low_level.md

Assembly, low-level programming, and OS internals

Table of contents

• Introduction and overview
• CPU
  • CPU word size
  • Endianness and NUXI problem
  • x87
  • CPU vulnerabilities
    • Spectre
  • Tricks
• Memory
  • Memory addressing
• Operating systems
  • Libraries
    • Linux
    • Windows
  • Device drivers

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Introduction and overview

🎥

• D.Sankel. Under the hood: Assembly, system calls, and hardware – C++Now (2023)

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CPU

🔗

• B.Wagstaff. A journey through the CPU pipeline (2013)

CPU word size

🔗

• S.Ignatchenko. Size matters – Overload 120 (2014)
• E.Musayev. A brief history of the road to 64 bits (in Russian, 2009)

📄

• J.Mashey. The long road to 64 bits – Communications of the ACM 52, 45-53 (2009)

Endianness and NUXI problem

🔗

• Endianness – Wikipedia

📖

• Essay 1: You must be joking – P.J.Plauger. Programming on purpose III: Essays on software technology (1994)

x87

See also Numeric data structures and algorithms.

🔗

• Pentium FDIV bug – Wikipedia
• B.Dawson. *Intel underestimates error bounds by 1.3 quintillion (2014)
• S.Duplichan. Intel overstates FPU accuracy (2013)
• T.R.Halfhill. The truth behind the Pentium bug – BYTE.com (1995)

❔

• Extended (80-bit) double floating point in x87, not SSE2 – we don’t miss it? – Stack Overflow
• Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point? – Retrocomputing

⚓

• Programming with the x87 floating-point unit – Intel

CPU vulnerabilities

Spectre

🎥

• Z.Bridges, D.Jeanpierre. Spectre/C++ – CppCon (2019)

Tricks

🎥

• C.Domas. The M/o/Vfuscator – Turning mov into a soul-crushing RE nightmare – Derbycon (2015)

📄

• S.Dolan. mov is Turing-complete (2013)

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Memory

🔗

• E.Martin. Some things I’ve learned about memory (2011)
• U.Drepper. What every programmer should know about memory (2007)
• Simple benchmark for memory throughput and latency
• L.Maranget, S.Sarkar, P.Sewell. A tutorial introduction to the ARM and POWER relaxed memory models (2012)

🎥

• U.Drepper. C++ and memory: Between correctness and performance – code::dive (2018)

Memory addressing

🔗

• D.A.Rusling. Ch. 3: Memory management – The Linux kernel
• C.Santili. x86 paging tutorial
• How does x86 paging work? – Stack Overflow
• What are near, far and huge pointers? – Stack Overflow

🎥

• JF Bastien. *(char*)0 = 0; – C++ on Sea (2023)
• C.Terman. Virtual memory. Part I, Part II – MIT 6.004: Computation structures (2013)

📖

• Essay 1: You must be joking – P.J.Plauger. Programming on purpose III: Essays on software technology (1994)

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Operating systems

Libraries

🎥

• O.Shilon. Linkers, loaders and shared libraries in Windows, Linux, and C++ – CppCon (2023)

Linux

🔗

• I.Wienand. Position independent code and x86-64 libraries (2013)
• E.Bendersky. Library order in static linking (2013)
• E.Bendersky. Load-time relocation of shared libraries (2011)
• E.Bendersky. Position independent code (PIC) in shared libraries (2011)
• E.Bendersky. Position independent code (PIC) in shared libraries on x64 (2011)

Windows

🔗

• S.Ignatchenko. To DLL or not to DLL – Overload 163 (2010)

🎥

• J.McNellis. Everything you ever wanted to know about DLLs – CppCon (2017)

Device drivers

🎥

• D.Saks. Memory-mapped devices as objects – CppCon (2020)

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