Why is systems programming often done in assembler, C, and C++?

What is git? How does git differ from Github?

What are the purposes of git’s add, commit, push and pull commands?

What is the terminal? the command line? the command prompt?

What is a shell? What shell do we use on goldengate?

What is the difference between static and dynamic allocation of memory?

How do we dynamically allocate memory in C?

Think of an example where we would need to allocate memory dynamically?

What is a pointer?

What are common uses of pointers in C?

What are the differences between pass-by-value and pass-by-pointer?

Think of an example where we would need to pass a function argument by pointer.

What is a segmentation fault? Give three (or more) coding mistakes that cause segmentation faults.

What is valgrind? How do we use it?

What is gdb? How can we use it?

What is malloc and free?

What does the compiler do? What do we need the compiler?

What is a binary executable file?

Why do we need to recompile C code to run on different hardware and operating systems?

What is a library? What does the linker do?

How are strings represented in binary?

How are floating-point numbers represented in binary?

What is a bit?

What is a byte? e.g. How many bits are in a byte?

Suppose we have 4 bytes of data in memory. How do we know whether these bytes represent string, floating-point number, color, or integer?

What is overflow? When does it occur for signed integers? When do it occur for unsigned integers?

How do we negate a binary number?

What is signed extension?

What is the difference between text and binary files? How can we read and write from either?

What is the different between little endian and big endian byte ordering?

Why (and when) is padding added to structs?

What is the difference between logical and arithmetic shifts?

What is the CPU?

What is RAM?

What is ISA?

What are the five main components of any Von Neuman Architecture?

What is the ALU?

What are registers? Name several important registers that are contained in the CPU.

What is a hardware bus?

What four steps are performed by the computing architecture everytime it executed an instruction.

What is assembly language?

What types of operands are there in assembly?

How does assembly handle data types?

What does the lea instruction do? How does it differ from the mov command?

How are parameters passed to functions?

How is machine code generated from source code? What is the relationship between machine code and assembly?

What is a register?

What is a memory form?

What do the registers %rsp and %rbp represent? How do they relate to functions?

What the do the registers %rax and %eax typically represent? When do we use one versus the other?

What two steps occur when the CPU executes the instruction push %rbp?

What two steps occur when the CPU executes the instruction pop %rbp?

What does callq do?

What does retq do?

How is the function stack implemented in assembler?

Why do buffer overflows present security risks? What is the easiest way to avoid security risks with buffer overflows?

What does it mean to reverse engineer a program?

What is the operating system?

What happens when the operating system runs a program?

Name three operating systems.

What does it mean to say that processes have a "lone view" of the operating system?

What is the BIOS or UEFI for?

Why do processes time share the CPU? What are the benefits of time sharing?

What must the OS do to context switch between processes?

What is virtual address space (VAS)? What are some advantages of VAS?

When does the OS send the SIGSEGV signal?

How do we send a kill signal to a process?

What is the difference between an interrupt and a trap?

Why do we need interrupts and traps?

What is a process?

What states can a process be in?

What is IPC?

Why do we need special mechanisms, such as pipes or sockets, to communicate between processes?

How can you kill a process using ps ?

What states can a process be in?

What is a zombie process?

What are the different states that a process can be in?

Why might we want to register a signal handler for the SIGKILL or SIGSEGV signal?

What are the differences between shared memory, signals and pipes?

For processes to run concurrently, what is needed in terms of hardware?

What is a thread?

What is a mutex? When do we need to use mutex?

What is a race condition?

What does it mean for a task to be atomic?

What is deadlock?

What does it mean for a function to be thread safe?

Why and when might we want to use multiple threads?

When might we want to use multiple processes versus multiple threads?

For threads to run concurrently, what is needed in terms of hardware?

When designing a multi-threaded application, what factors should we consider?

What mechanisms can we use to synchronize between threads?

What is a critical section of code? *

What is the memory hierarchy?

What are some examples of primary storage?

What are some examples of secondary storage?

What is locality and what impact does it have on performance?

What is sbrk()? Why do we use functions such as malloc and free, rather than call sbrk() directly from our programs?

In the reading on malloc, what was the purpose of the free list?

What are three characteristics of different types of memory?

What are different metrics we might consider for optimizing a program?

What types of optimizations can the compiler do?

What types of optimizations can the compiler NOT do?

What is function inlining?

What is loop unrolling?