Schedule

Readings:

• For background, review our guides on electricity, binary/hexadecimal numbers, and the unix command line.
• Bookmark this collection of unix video tutorials that were prepared for CS107 students. These videos cover basic concepts, common utilities, development tools, and productivity features.
• An interactive tour of Mango Pi board
• The Ripes RISC-V simulator demoed in lecture.
• Our one-page guide to RISC-V.
• A "for fun" diversion: Steven Wolfram's blog post Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace traces the work of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace to develop the concept of a general-purpose computer.

• Here is a link to the Ripes simulator demoed in lecture.
• If you have a printout of the one-page guide to RISC-V, bring it along!
• Enjoy Danny Cohen's article Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace on the history of little-endian vs. big-endian.

• Brush up on C basics (syntax, data types, operators, control structures) via your favorite C reference; sections 1-2 of Nick Parlante's EssentialC; or chapters 1, 2, and 3 of K&R. Skip content on I/O and standard libraries (we are bare metal!)
• Read Dennis Ritchie's account of the history of C
• Try out the Compiler Explorer demoed in lecture
• Read our guides on make and gcc

• Review EssentialC chapters 3 and 6 (postpone heap and memory management for later) or K&R 5.1-5.4.
• C volatile can be subtle and tricky. See GeeksForGeeks advice on correct use and John Regehr's blog on what NOT to do with volatile

• Read up on C functions (Chapter 4 in K&R, or Section 4 in Essential C).

• Review this excellent tutorial on serial communication from Sparkfun.
• Use your C reference to read up characters, C-strings, and output functions (putc,puts,printf) (Sections 1.5, 1.6, 1.9, 5.5, 6, 7 in K&R; or Section 3 in EssentialC). C-strings are primitive compared to Java/C++ strings; take note of the manual effort required to use and pitfalls to avoid.
• Historical diversion: Poul-Henning Kamp's essay on The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake. Did Ken, Dennis, and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings?

• Our guide to binutils
• Anatomy of a simple linker script example from ld documentation
• Longer tutorial on bare-metal RISC-V build, thanks to Lucas Fryzek
• Go deeper: David Welch's very thorough articles on baremetal programming and bss data.

• Read our overview of stack frames
• Review dynamic memory allocation (malloc/free in C) and the operation of the heap (K&R 5.6-5.9 or Essential C Section 6). Compare and contrast stack versus heap allocation. Why do we need both?