phoxis C Language, Coding Discussions, Computer Science, Linux Programming

Dirty8085: An Intel 8085 Microprocessor simulator

This is another quick post about an unfinished (but working) software which I wrote around 8 years ago. It is an Intel 8085 microprocessor simulator, with a text based interface. The objective was to simulate the microprocessor, along with a minimal interface which closely resembles the microprocessor kit with the 7-segment displays, hex keyboard and minimal debugging features.

Quick story

In our undergraduate computer science degree, we had a few subjects on microprocessor architecture. One of the subjects focused on the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture in great details, Intel 8086 architecture, interfacing, etc. Along with the detailed architecture, we also had to do some assembly code for 8085. It was fun because, we had to use a physical 8085 microprocessor kit with a hex keyboard and just those 7-segment displays.

8085 Microprocessor trainer kit

To write a code in the kit, you need to scan through the memory and enter the values of the assembled code. Who assembles it? We had to do that manually. We would have a table of all the instructions and the hex value for the op-code. More essentially it is very important to know the precise operations for each instruction. What operation it performs, which registers are accessed, what memory locations are accessed and how does it change the flags.

It gets more interesting (sometimes painful) when you first write your code in assembly in a white sheet of physical paper, then you refer the table and convert the assembly code to machine code, basically an entire page of hex values. Next, you get to your 8085 microprocessor kit, start from a memory location and keep on typing these hex values like a maniac. There were 8085 microprocessor kits which had some “debugging” facility, but essentially, if something goes wrong, it was extremely difficult to find, given our skills.

Although we were required to use the physical 8085 microprocessor kit in the exams, but for practice, we used 8085 microprocessor simulators. There are quite a few 8085 microprocessor simulators available. One of them was provided with one of the text books. There were simulators with text interface, some with text and some with nice GUI interfaces. I used one of them, the GNUSim8085. You can find an in depth review of GNUSim8085, which I wrote for OpenSource For You long ago, also posted here: Reviewing the GNUSim8085 (v1.3.7).

I personally did not like most of the simulators or the interfaces. All of them involved a lot of mouse-clicking, which slows you down a lot and does not reflect the actual 8085 trainer kit experience. There were a few which had full keyboard control, but somehow we felt that they were cumbersome. The Intel 8085 trainer kit experience was highly required inorder to timely and correctly finish the tasks given in the examination. The good thing was, I (and a few of my friends) knew exactly what I was looking for. Therefore I tried to make one … (drum roll) … Dirty8085.

Continue reading “Dirty8085: An Intel 8085 Microprocessor simulator” →

phoxis C Language, Computer Science, Linux / Unix Shell, Overview, Uncategorized

CPULeash: A tool for capping per-process and process group CPU utilisation from userspace

It’s now mid October, there are 0 posts in 2017. Therefore I think it’s time to loosen up posting constraints and try make a bit more casual posts. For a start I will dig up one of the unfinished works. I will start with a quick overview of an old piece of tool (unmaintained) I wrote quite a few years ago. The tool caps the maximum CPU utilisation of a process from userspace without requiring root access. One instance of the process can cap multiple processes individually, in a group or it can also cap an entire process sub-tree. I intended to post about it in great detail, but this time I will keep it brief, and dig deeper in the next opportunity. Let’s get into it.

Motivation (from agony)

A few years ago, I was used to run different CPU intensive experiments on my old laptop, which would sometime run weeks. The CPU temperature used to go up to 95 Deg C. Sometimes it went upto 99 Deg C and then it used to throttle down the cores to get the temperature down. This is definitely not a healthy temperature, therefore I feared of hardware damage. The laptop had a metal case, which became so hot that it left red marks on my thighs. One time an entire chocolate bar melted into a pool of liquid chocolate (someone left it near the exhaust fan). Therefore it was time that I figure something out, such that I can run the experiments, but keep the laptop cool (relatively).

The obvious idea was to cap the CPU usage for the processes. An easy solution is to install a virtual machine and run the code inside the virtual environment. Note that, in my case nice does not work, as it does not help control how much of the CPU a processes utilises when it acquires it. I could have used cgroups, but I didn’t want to (I don’t know why). At that point of time I was feeling the need for Solaris Zones.

Essentially what I wanted is something portable in any *nix system, works completely from userspace and also does not need root privilege. Therefore I made a small tool which does in. It was written in C and POSIX compliant libraries.

Also note that, there is a similiar kind of tool called cpulimit, which I didn’t know existed when I wrote this. This tool works well too.

Given this situation, it was time to write something in-house … drum roll … CPULeash.

Continue reading “CPULeash: A tool for capping per-process and process group CPU utilisation from userspace” →

phoxis C Language, Coding Discussions, Computer Science, Linux Programming

Hacking (Reverse engineering): Gaining access with wrong password

In this post, I will quickly show how you can use a debugger to hack poorly written or packaged code. More specifically, how to enter a wrong password but still get access. Before proceeding, I should be clear, that this is just a demonstration, and the programs out there in production (these days) will definitely not vulnerable to this method (if it is, then it is a shitty program). This is to demonstrate how you can change the execution path as you wish.

First I will show a simple code which prompts for a password to be set, then encrypts it using MD5 sum hash and salt and stores the hash in a file. Then it asks for the same password, reads the hash from the stored file and compares if the two entered passwords are same or not. Then I will show how to reverse engineer the executable file and enter the wrong password, but still make it think that we the correct password was entered. Continue reading “Hacking (Reverse engineering): Gaining access with wrong password” →

phoxis C Language, Computer Science

C Q&A #6: An interesting difference between the C and C++ conditional operator

int main (void)
{
  int a = 5, b = 10, c;

  c = a > 3 ? b = 5 : a = 3;
  printf ("%d %d %d\n", a, b, c);
  //cout << a << " " << b << " " << c << endl;
  
  return 0;
}

Have a look at the above code, what will be the outcome if the code was in C language and if in C++ Language (replace with printf with cout)?

Directly going to the solution. Compilation error for C, and works perfect (no warnings) with C++. I saw this problem is a C question and answer book which didn’t bother to explain, so here is the explanation. Continue reading “C Q&A #6: An interesting difference between the C and C++ conditional operator” →

phoxis C Language, Computer Science, Humor

C LANGUAGE UERS! Y U NO SEE STANDARDS!

C LANGUAGE USERS! Y U NO SEE STANDARDS!
C LANGUAGE USERS!
Y U NO SEE STANDARDS!

I had to make this. There are people who give a damn to the standards and follow the stone age Turbo C 3.1 compiler, run programs compiled by it. In the cases for compiler dependent and undefined behaviours, they try to guess in some way why the output was like that and get into a conclusion. Continue reading “C LANGUAGE UERS! Y U NO SEE STANDARDS!” →

phoxis C Language, Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Dynamically allocating 2d array with adjacent rows in memory

In a previous post “Allocating multidimentional array at runtime in C” I have explained a technique to allocate multidimensional arrays on runtime. While playing around with OpenMPI, I came to know that while sending/receiving a buffer, it requires the elements of a 2d matrix (or any dimension) to be in adjacent. Basically it does not care what you send, or receive, what it cares is the number of elements to be send should be adjacent to one another. In the previous post, the process will allocate the 2d or n-d matrix, but the rows of the matrix may not be adjacent to each other, as each row was allocated separately with malloc and then inserted into another array of pointers, each of which location points to the base addresses of these memory block. Read the post for details.

In C language the 2d array/matrix are stored in a row-major order, that is the elements of the matrix are stored adjacent to each other in the memory row wise. The first row comes first then just after the first row the second row starts, and so on. In the previous method the rows of the matrix may be scattered throughout the memory, as they are allocated with seperate malloc calls, but each of these returned addresses to the memory blocks (used as rows) are assigned to another array of pointers, which holds the rows together, and allows the mat[i][j] syntax to work.

For the applications in which, we might need to allocate the matrix dynamically at runtime, also have the rows of the matrix requires to be adjacent in the memory, and also make the mat[i][j] syntax work can be fulfilled by the following approach.
Continue reading “Dynamically allocating 2d array with adjacent rows in memory” →

phoxis C Language, Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Journey of a simple recursive code

Some one asked the following question in StackOverflow

Implement a function with prototype char *repeat(char *s, int n) so that it creates and returns a string which consists of n repetitions of the input string s. For example: if the input is “Hello” and 3, the output is “HelloHelloHello”. Use only recursive constructs.

I immediately started compiling the answer as it was a pretty straight forward question. But it was not only me who was posting the answer. So after posting, very quickly other answers started appearing. It was a general everyday answer, until a person (who also answered the question) pointed out a bug in my code. Bugs disturb the mind. So I dug into the code and fixed it. The things started to get challenging when others started to get more compact code, which didn’t let me sit idle.
Continue reading “Journey of a simple recursive code” →

phoxis C Language, Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Detect Endianness of a System

In a previous post “Little and Big Endian conversion” i have briefly discussed about the Big-Endian and the Little-Endian representations. It is the ordering of the bytes (elementary addressable elements) within the representation of a larger basic data type. These are the two byte orderings in the memory within a larger datatype. For example if the size of integer is 4 bytes in a system, then will the least significant byte be stored in the lower memory address or in the higher memory address. In short: if the most significant byte is stored in higher memory address then it is called the Little Endian representation, and if the most significant byte is stored in lower memory address than the least significant byte then it is called the Big-Endian representation. For a diagram see the post “Little and Big Endian conversion”. Also refer the Wikipedia Entry on Endianness.

So how to determine if your system a Little Endian system or a Big Endian system by running a piece of code? Continue reading “Detect Endianness of a System” →