How to get the actual address of a pointer in C?
- by Airjoe
BACKGROUND:
I'm writing a single level cache simulator in C for a homework assignment, and I've been given code that I must work from. In our discussions of the cache, we were told that the way a small cache can hold large addresses is by splitting the large address into the position in the cache and an identifying tag. That is, if you had an 8 slot cache but wanted to store something with address larger than 8, you take the 3 (because 2^3=8) rightmost bits and put the data in that position; so if you had address 22 for example, binary 10110, you would take those 3 rightmost bits 110, which is decimal 5, and put it in slot 5 of the cache. You would also store in this position the tag, which is the remaining bits 10.
One function, cache_load, takes a single argument, and integer pointer. So effectively, I'm being given this int* addr which is an actual address and points to some value. In order to store this value in the cache, I need to split the addr. However, the compiler doesn't like when I try to work with the pointer directly. So, for example, I try to get the position by doing:
npos=addr%num_slots
The compiler gets angry and gives me errors. I tried casting to an int, but this actually got me the value that the pointer was pointing to, not the numerical address itself. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
