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W1a Endian

The document discusses endianness, explaining the difference between little endian and big endian byte ordering in multi-byte objects, particularly in the context of C programming. It highlights the implications of endianness when transferring data between different systems and provides examples of pointer usage and arithmetic. Additionally, it includes code snippets for demonstrating byte representation and poses problems related to identifying endianness in programming.

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10 views16 pages

W1a Endian

The document discusses endianness, explaining the difference between little endian and big endian byte ordering in multi-byte objects, particularly in the context of C programming. It highlights the implications of endianness when transferring data between different systems and provides examples of pointer usage and arithmetic. Additionally, it includes code snippets for demonstrating byte representation and poses problems related to identifying endianness in programming.

Uploaded by

testtit1231
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Endianness

Systems Software

1
Addresses of multi-byte objects
 Ex: consider the declaration
int x;
on a 32-bit machine. x takes up 4 bytes in memory.
 So if x occupies the addresses 0x100 through

0x103, what is the address of x (value of the C


expression &x)?
 Convention: the address of a multi-byte object is the

smallest of the addresses used to store the bytes.

2
Byte Ordering
 Two popular conventions
 Intel is a little endian architecture

 Least significant byte is stored at lowest address


 Some other systems use big endian
 Most significant byte is stored at lowest address

 Ex: How would int x = 0x01234567 at address


0x100 be stored?

3
Little Endian
 Ex: How would int x = 0x01234567 at address
0x100 be stored?
0x100 0x101 0x102 0x103

67 45 23 01

4
Origin of Big & Little Endians
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
A law requiring all citizens of Lilliput to break their

soft-eggs at the little ends only


A civil war breaking between the Little Endians and

the Big Endians, resulting in the Big Endians taking


refuge on a nearby island, the kingdom of Blefuscu
Satire over holy wars between Protestant Church of

England and the Catholic Church of France

5
Do we care?
 For most programs we don’t have to worry about endianness …
variables generally work as you would expect

 Endianness matters
 When transferring data over a network between machines with different
endianness
 When inspecting binary data representing integers. Consider the following
IA32 instruction and its disassembly:

80483bd: 01 05 64 94 04 08 add %eax, 0x8049464

6
Pointers
 A pointer is a variable declared to store a memory
address
 declaration syntax: type *var_name;

 Pointers can be to any data type, including

structures

7
Pointers
Important pointer-related operators
& : address-of
* : dereference (not the same as the * used for
declarations!!!)
 Example

int i = 5; /* i is an int containing 5 */


int *p; /* p is a pointer to an int */
int j; /* j is an uninitialized int */

p = &i; /* store the address of i in p */


j = *p; /* store the value p points to into j */

8
Pointers and Arrays
 Array name  a pointer to the initial (0th) array
element
 Example

int a[10];
int *ptr;

/* following statements are same */


ptr = a;
ptr = &a[0];

9
The sizeof operator
 The sizeof operator gets a variable or a type as an input
and outputs its size in bytes.
 Typical sizes on a 32-bit machine

sizeof(char) == 1
sizeof(short) == 2
sizeof(int) == 4
sizeof(int *) == 4
 Lookup

 signed/unsigned – int, char, short

10
Pointer arithmetic
 Addition/subtraction operations on pointers work in
multiples of the size of the data type being pointed
to
 Example

char *cp1;
int *ip1;
double *dp1;

cp1++; /* Increments address by 1 */


ip1++; /* Increments address by 4 */
dp1++; /* Increments address by 8 */

11
Casting
 Reference an object according to a different data
type from which it was created.
 You can cast pointers to be pointers to other types.
This is powerful.

12
Code to print byte representation
int main(void) {
int i=12345, j;
unsigned char *p = (unsigned char *) &i;

for (j=0; j<4; j++)


printf(“Offset %d: %x\n", j, p[j]);
}
Offset 0: 39
Decimal: 12345
Output on a Offset 1: 30
little-endian Offset 2: 0 Binary: 0011 0000 0011 1001
machine Offset 3: 0 Hex: 3 0 3 9

13
show_bytes routine P. 37

typedef
typedef unsigned
unsigned char
char *byte_pointer;
*byte_pointer;

void
void show_bytes(byte_pointer
show_bytes(byte_pointer start,
start, int
int len){
len){
int
int i;
i;
for
for (i
(i == 0;
0; ii << len;
len; i++)
i++)
printf(“
printf(“ %.2x",
%.2x", start[i]);
start[i]);
printf("\n");
printf("\n");
}}

14
Problem P. 40
Consider the following three calls to show_bytes

int val = 0x12345678;


byte_pointer valp = (byte_pointer) &val;
show_bytes(valp, 1); /* A. */
show_bytes(valp, 2); /* B. */
show_bytes(valp, 3); /* C. */

Indicate the values that would be printed by each call


on a little-endian machine and on a big-endian
machine.

15
Problem P. 100
 Write a procedure is_little_endian that will
return 1 when compiled and run on a little-endian
machine, and will return 0 when compiled and run
on a big-endian machine. This program should
always run on any machine, regardless of its word
size.

16

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