Instructor Site: Exam Problems

This page is a catalog of some exam problems from the ICS class at Carnegie Mellon. You'll need a CS:APP account to access the exams. Here is how the page is organized:

The problems are bundled together into a single master exam.
For each problem, we give its problem number in the master exam, a brief description, and the point total, which corresponds roughly to expected solution time in minutes.
The solution for each problem is embedded directly in the Latex source file. Search for the keyword "answer".
Problems are sorted by topic area.

Warning: As courses based on CS:APP become more widespread, the solutions to these exam problems are sure to leak out. To protect yourself, you should use the example questions as guides, tweaking the values a bit.

Master Exam

Master exam ( pdf, latex driver file, latex style file )
Tar file of all master exam files (exams.tar)

Individual Exam Problems

Chapter 1: A Tour of Computer Systems
Chapter 2: Representing and Manipulating Information
- Problem 1: Structure and union alignment (6 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 2: Bit manipulation (matching problem) (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 3: Floating point classification (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 4: Floating point puzzles (interesting values) (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 5: Floating point puzzles (interesting values) (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 6: Floating point puzzles (8 bit) (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 7: Integer and floating point puzzles (20 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 8: Structure layout and access (9 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 9: Two's complement encoding and arithmetic (9 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 10: Floating point encoding (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 11: Two's complement encoding (5 bit) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 12: Two's complement encoding (6 bit) (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 3: Machine-Level Representation of Programs
- Problem 13: Array layout and access (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 14: Array layout and access (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 15: Array layout and access (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 16: Structure and array layout and access (6 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 17: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 18: Array layout and access (14 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 19: Structure and union layout and access (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 20: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 21: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 22: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 23: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 24: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 25: Decompiling a C ``for'' loop (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 26: Stack discipline (Dr. Evil's buffer overflow) (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 27: Mapping of arithment operations to assembly (7 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 28: Matching C conditional to the corresponding assembly (3 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 29: Matching C two's comp arithmetic to the corresponding assembly (3 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 30: Matching C pointer code to the corresponding assembly (3 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 31: Stack discipline (buffer overflow) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 32: Stack discipline (buffer overflow) (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 33: Stack discipline (function call and return) (4 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 34: Stack discipline (6 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 35: Stack discipline (buffer overflow) (Part I) (14 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 36: Stack discipline (buffer overflow) (Part II) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 37: Structure alignment and access (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 38: Structure layout and access (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 4: Processor Architecture
Chapter 5: Optimizing Program Performance
- Problem 39: Program optimization (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 40: Program optimization (9 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 41: Associativity and its relationship to parallelism (cool!) (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 6: The Memory Hierarchy
- Problem 42: Low-level cache access (5 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 43: Low-level cache access (5 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 44: High-level cache miss rate analysis (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 45: Basic cache organization (6 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 46: High-level cache miss rate analysis (7 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 47: High-level cache miss rate analysis (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 48: High-level cache miss rate analysis (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 49: High-level cache miss rate analysis (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 50: High-level miss rate analysis (14 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 51: Medium-level cache conflict miss analysis (4x4 transpose) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 52: Medium-level cache conflict miss analysis (2x2 transpose) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 7: Linking
Chapter 8: Exceptional Control Flow
- Problem 53: Process control (5 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 54: Process control (4 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 55: Process control (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 56: Process control (5 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 57: Process control (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 58: Process control and signals (16 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 59: Signals and signal handling (4 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 60: Process control and signals (timeout version of fgets) (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 9: Virtual Memory
- Problem 61: VM address translation (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 62: VM address translation (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 63: VM address translation and cache lookup (12 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 64: Dynamic memory allocation (8 pts) [pdf, latex]
- Problem 65: Dynamic memory allocation (10 pts) [pdf, latex]
Chapter 10: System-Level I/O
Chapter 11: Network Programming
Chapter 12: Concurrent Programming

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