# Lab 5

Deadline: EOL (End of Lab) Friday, October 18th

## Objectives

• TSWBAT practice debugging RISC-V assembly code.
• TSWBAT write RISC-V functions that use pointers.

## RISC-V Simulator

Like in previous weeks, we will be using the Venus RISC-V simulator (which can be found online here).

## Exercise 1: Debugging megalistmanips.s

In Lab 4, you completed a RISC-V procedure that applied a function to every element of a linked list. In this lab, you will be working with a similar (but slightly more complex) version of that procedure.

Now, instead of having a linked list of int’s, our data structure is a linked list of int arrays. Remember that when dealing with arrays in struct’s, we need to explicitly store the size of the array. In C code, here’s what the data structure looks like:

struct node {
int *arr;
int size;
struct node *next;
};


Also, here’s what the new map function does: it traverses the linked list and for each element in each array of each node, it applies the passed-in function to it, and stores it back into the array.

void map(struct node *head, int (*f)(int)) {
for (int i = 0; i < head->size; i++) {
}
}


### Action Item

Record your answers to the following questions in a text file. Some of the questions will require you to run the RISC-V code using Venus’ simulator tab.

1. Find the five mistakes inside the map function in megalistmanips.s. Read all of the commented lines under the map function in megalistmanips.s (before it returns with jr ra), and make sure that the lines do what the comments say. Some hints:
• Why do we need to save stuff on the stack before we call jal?
• What’s the difference between add t0, s0, x0 and lw t0, 0(s0)?
• Pay attention to the types of attributes in a struct node.
• Note: you need only focus on map, mapLoop, and done functions but it’s worth understanding the full program.
• Note: you may not use any s registers outside of s0 and s1.
2. For this exercise, we are requiring that you don’t use any extra save registers in your implementation. While you normally can use the save registers to store values that you want to use after returning from a function (in this case, when we’re calling f in map), we want you to use temporary registers instead and follow their caller/callee conventions. The provided map implementation uses the s0 and s1 registers, so we’ll require that you don’t use s2-s11.
3. Make an ordered list of each of the five mistakes, and the corrections you made to fix them.
4. Save your corrected code in the megalistmanips.s file. Running on Venus, you should see the following output:
Lists before:
5 2 7 8 1
1 6 3 8 4
5 2 7 4 3
1 2 3 4 7
5 6 7 8 9

Lists after:
30 6 56 72 2
2 42 12 72 20
30 6 56 20 12
2 6 12 20 56
30 42 56 72 90


### Checkpoint

At this point, make sure that you are comfortable with the following. Note that these will not be part of the lab checkoff, but are meant to benchmark how comfortable you are with the material in the exercise.

• You should know how to debug in Venus, including stepping through code and inspecting the contents of registers.
• You should understand how RISC-V interfaces with memory.
• You should understand CALLER/CALLEE conventions in RISC-V.

## Exercise 2: Write a function without branches

Consider the discrete-valued function f defined on integers in the set {-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3}. Here’s the function definition:

f(-3) = 6
f(-2) = 61
f(-1) = 17
f(0) = -38
f(1) = 19
f(2) = 42
f(3) = 5


### Action Item

1. Implement the function in discrete_fn.s in RISC-V, with the condition that your code may NOT use any branch and/or jump instructions!
2. Save your corrected code in a file discrete_fn.s.