Interview Embedded Software Questions

Always remember Knuth's rules of optimisation:

Why does Endianness depend on Bit_order ? Why Bit_order is always of Big Endian in a Byte irrespective of the Little Endian or Big Endian CPU design?

A really good question to ask.

It will tell whether the candidate is aware of the Endiannes, Byte_Order, Bit_Order and Bit manipulations.

His explanations will give his view about the Dependencies and reasons for Endianness and marks for the following.

- Reasoning power

- Technical strength

- Analytical power

- Creativity

Regards, Karthik Balaguru

( Thx, got it from comp.arch.embedded recently): Good answer : endian-ness is not a function of the bits or the bytes, but of the *addressing*. Most machines can not address bits, so bits are not part of endian-ness. If a machine only addresses words and not bytes, it does not *have* endian-ness in any regard.

Regards, Karthik Balaguru

Someone's education is severely lacking if they can't determine that XORing a value with 1 is going to toggle the LS bit each time.

About the only lack of clarity I see in the "a^=1;" example is the lack of whitespace.

Ever work on an Internet message router fed by T3 lines?

For those of us who haven't seen the answer, what is it? Off the top of my head, I'd say that three gates are needed but possibly only two with some gymnastics.

Of course it toggles LSB, but it does not tell anything about the rest of the 'a'.

Two pages down there will be if(a==1){do_smth} How would he now that 'a' can not be equal to 2?