Older blog entries for saju (starting at number 2)

14 Aug 2006 (updated 14 Aug 2006 at 05:54 UTC) »

Dynamic locks for openssl .. hmm are these even used ? I have 2 problems with locks and openssl

  1. No provision for passing user context between lock creation/locking/destroy callbacks
  2. Openssl doesn't care if the callback to lock actually succeded. The return type of the callback is void.

Actually I am struggling with (1) right now. As part of another project, I am writing Apache Portable Runtime (apr) ssl wrappers over openssl api's (well over some of them) and I would very much like to allocate memory for dynamic locks from a caller supplied pool but the openssl callback semantics for dyna locking don't allow this. Grrr

22 Mar 2006 (updated 14 Aug 2006 at 05:41 UTC) »

I have been working on a compiler in my free time that attempts to take a C like src file and targets the JVM platform. Ofcourse since I don't have the slightest clue about the JVM platform I spent sometime poking at the class file format. Here is a spinoff from that project .. http://saju.pillai.googlepages.com/kapi. Kapi is a java class file disassembler for Win32 that also produces useful src hints .. like the "good twin" of javap.

Also, I don't really hate Win32 - I just think it is retarded ..sometimes.

21 Mar 2006 (updated 21 Mar 2006 at 10:51 UTC) »

On byte swapping and endianess

I have seen various implementations of htonl(). Most of them look like ...
(x >> 24) | ((x & 0xff0000) >> 8) | (( x & 0xff00) << 8) | (x << 24);

Let's restrict ourselves to the M$ VC++ 6 32 bit machine and see what the compiler makes of that htonl() implementation..

F:\maya\misc>cl

Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Standard Compiler Version 12.00.8168 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998. All rights reserved.

F:\maya\misc>cat htonl.c

int htonl(int x)
{
  return (x >> 24) | ((x & 0xff0000) >> 8) | (( x & 0xff00) << 8) | (x << 24);
}


Now we ask the compiler to show us the (un-optimised) assembly for this file

F:\maya\misc>cl /c /Fa htonl.c
F:\maya\misc>more htonl.asm
/** _snip_ **/
; File htonl.c
; Line 2
        push    ebp
        mov     ebp, esp
; Line 3
        mov         eax, DWORD PTR _x$[ebp]
        sar     eax, 24                                 ; 00000018H
        mov     ecx, DWORD PTR _x$[ebp]
        and     ecx, 16711680                           ; 00ff0000H
        sar     ecx, 8
        or      eax, ecx
        mov     edx, DWORD PTR _x$[ebp]
        and     edx, 65280                              ; 0000ff00H
        shl     edx, 8
        or      eax, edx
        mov     ecx, DWORD PTR _x$[ebp]
        shl     ecx, 24                                 ; 00000018H
        or      eax, ecx
; Line 4
        pop     ebp
        ret     0
_htonl  ENDP
_TEXT   ENDS
END

That seems like a lot of stuff for endianness conversion. Now let's see if a little bit of inline assembly can't fix this ..

F:\maya\misc>cat htonl.c
int htonl(int j)
{
  _asm
    {
      mov eax, j
      bswap eax
    }
}


And the assembly for this is ...

F:\maya\misc>more htonl.asm
/** snip **/
; File htonl.c
; Line 2
        push    ebp
        mov     ebp, esp
        push    ebx
        push    esi
        push    edi
; Line 5
        mov     eax, DWORD PTR _j$[ebp]
; Line 6
        bswap   eax
; Line 8
        pop     edi
        pop     esi
        pop     ebx
        pop     ebp
        ret     0
_htonl  ENDP
_TEXT   ENDS
END

So, the assembly is neater and smaller. If you ignore all the pushes and pop's need to make that inline assembly work, you will see that
the main brunt of the work is done by the *bswap* instruction which takes 1 to 3 cycles for all the dirty work.

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