I had not taken the time to try and work with Rust on ARM64 in the past. Since I was doing disassembly of simple C programs on an one of our servers, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try the same thing with rust.
Continue readingLast post I showed how to do multiplication for a vector of integers using ARM64 instructions. Lots of use cases require these kinds of operations to be performed in bulk. The Neon coprocessor has instructions that allow for the parallel loading and multiplication of numbers. Here’s my simplistic test of these instructions.
Continue readingLets start with the basics: we can multiply the cells two vectors in C code and disassemble the resulting binary. This is a trivial operation of multiplying each cell in the first vector by the corresponding cell in the second vector. It is not a cross product. This will be a naive implementation, but it should get us started.
Continue readingAARCH64 has a lot of general purpose registers. How many? Lets see.
Continue readingWhile multiplication is defined in the context of repeated addition, implementing it that way algorithmically is not nearly as efficient as some other approaches. One algorithm for multiplication that is an order of magnitude faster is to halve one number while doubling the other. I gave myself the challenge of implementing this algorithm in AARCH64 Assembly, and it was not too hard.
Continue readingNow that I can run the Knuth version of the Insertion sort via MIXAL, I want to convert it to AARCH64 Assembly. What I am going to try to do here is a line by line translation. This is not necessarily how I would write the insertion sort in AARCH64 assembly, but rather a direct translation of the MIXAL version.
Continue readingA debugger is a wonderful tool for understanding what actually happens in a piece of code. Donald Knuth’s coding in TAOCP is archaic enough that I do not understand it just by reading through. This is due to a combination of my unfamiliarity with MIXAL, as well as some of the coding conventions he’s chosen. So, I’m going to step through the MIXAL code in mixvm, and annotate what I find.
Continue readingWith the information gained in last posts investigations, I now know how to turn the smaple code of the insertion sort out of TAOCP into runnable code.
Continue readingThe examples in The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) are in the MIXAL programming language. In order to see these examples run, I want to install the tools on my Fedora box. They are packaged as RPMS, so this is trivial. Here are the steps to run and debug a sample program in MIXAL.
Continue readingFor the next couple tasks I want to do in assembly, I need to be able to inspect an array of numbers. This is useful for debugging searching and sorting algorithms. Since my last attempt to convert binary to ASCII was so ugly, I figured I would clean that up at the same time.
It turns out I can use the reverse code as well.
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