You can check the current garbage collection stats to see how you and your classmates are doing.
Your score for this assignment is based out of 70 points:
10 points - checkpoint, you should know this by now
50 points - correctness
30 - actual program tests, 5 points for each test
20 - tracefile tests
10 - noncoalescing tracefiles
10 - coalescing tracefiles (coalescing.rep and random2.rep)
IMPORTANT: you will only get full credit if you get reasonable
utilization on these tests, ie more than %50. coalescing.rep
won't actually fail like random2.rep
5 points - style, see below
5 points - performance, see handout
Five points of your assignment are allocated based on style. Style is a subjective criterion, but we will use the following as a guideline in assigning style points:
You will lose 1-3 points for the following:
-Poor commenting (either lack of quantity or quality)
-Memory leaks
-Heavy use of constants (ie, using 12 instead of sizeof(Tree))
-Inadaquate writeup in handin.txt.
-Undescriptive variable names, functoin names, comments (ie, foo..)
-Compiler warning with -Wall turned on
You wil gain 1-3 points for the following:
-Good function decomposition
-Good code reuse
-Highly portable code
-Excellant writeup in handin.txt
You can't score more than 5 or less than 0 points for style.
You must run gmake handin to submit your code for the checkpoint. gmake update will only submit your code to the webserver and will run the all the tests (not just the checkpoint tests). No code submitted with gmake update will be graded.
The checkpoint is worth 10 points. Your grade for the checkpoint is based on whether you pass the tests the -k option of the driver runs. You either get all the points or none. However, if you don't have the program working, you will get partial credit for handing in late. For each day late, you lose two points, so:
On time 10
Wed night 8
Thu night 6
Fri night 4
Sat night 2
Any later 0
Please don't handin unless you actually have a working version.
Read the assignment several times and go over confusing parts with your partner. Make sure you understand all the code in malloc.c before you write anything.
Q: How do we know the top of the stack?
A: It is in the given somewhere in the code. Also, you could daisy chain through the ebp values until you get to the top of the stack.
Q: What is the data area for?
A: There are three types of objects in a program.
1. Those that are allocated in the stack (which are local to functions)
2. Those that are dynamically allocated by malloc.
3. Those defined globally. These cannot be allocated on the stack, because, there is really no stack at the time they area allocate
-- global variables are allocated at the compile time.
The data are contains these global variables. So you should stride through the are via a pointer and everything that "looks like " a pointer is a root.
Q: What does "looks like a pointer" mean?
A: Any word whose value is between dseg_lo and dseg_hi looks like a pointer. it just looks like one, because it actually may not be one. For example, if you define an integer as follows:
void foo () {
int i = 0xFFA01
}
then it may happen that the value 0xFFA01 is an address in the heap. Unfortunately, when you see the word
corresponding to i in the stack you cannot tell its type, it might as well be a pointer. in the end both
pointer and ints are stored in the same way. in general, any word in the stack or register or the
data area can be a pointer and you would not know if it actually is or not. so, CONSERVATIVELY, we will assume that everything that looks like a pointer is a pointer.
Q: How can we find the "pointers" in a block.
A: You see if each word in the block looks like a pointer. A word
looks like a pointer if its value (unsigned integer value) falls between dseg_lo and dseg_hi.
So you should stride through the memory allocated for the block and adds those that
looks like a pointer to your stack.
Q: How can i find the start of a block. the alloc_tree gives me the size and the children and not the start of the block?
A: Note that the tree itself is allocated in the heap, i.e. the address of the node that "contains" returns is actually the address of the node in the memory. since the block is embedded in a node, you can determine the address of a block from that of the node easily by accounting for the other members of the node (size, prev and next).
Q: Similarly, when deleting the a block, i need an address that the block contains to be able to delete it -- that is just how the splay tree interface works. So where do i get that
address?
A: The previous question might be helpful with this.
Q: This assignment looks hard. how am i supposed to figure everything out?
A: Start early. Discuss things with your partner. Go to office hours. Go over the lecture notes and book. Don't hesitate to ask for help.
The provided code will not call garbage_collect for you. You have to decide where and when the best time to call garbage_collect is.
When you gmake update the script will build your code with optimizations turned on (-O).
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