[ECOS] Re: Regd. the MMU in eCos1.3.1
Jonathan Larmour
jifl@eCosCentric.com
Tue Apr 8 01:02:00 GMT 2003
Rajan Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The query launched by Mr Prabal is very much valid.
> In follow-ups, it is said that why at all memory locking
> is needed, let me elaborate the need.
> Suppose I want some data to be protected against
> accidental writes. If the page/segment is write protected,
> eCos could generate an exception (write attempt on
> RO page/segment) when some thread tries to
> write on this area due to some coding bug.
> So testing will become very easy.
>
> Kindly see that eCos is getting so popular that
> it has been widely accepted for realtime
> embedded softwares, so these kind of lock
> requirements should be met.
I agree, but see below....
> Or you can guide us, how to write memory locking for
> a given processor, eCos too can accept
> this facility in its overall source-code
eCos is lightweight, and the burden of levels of page tables and so on
would make eCos less suitable for the low-end, so at best it would be an
option.
Some people say that we should always protect the text segment, and while
that's _mostly_ true, it isn't always, not least for things like software
breakpoints, nevermind self-modifying code (anathema in general, but can
be a useful tool in resource-constrained systems).
It would be good to have some scalable, flexible, lightweight and generic
API to allow people to fiddle with the MMU mappings, but this is _hard_.
MMUs are one of the areas that differ radically between MMUs and trying to
design an API in such a way as to prevent the API making life difficult
for the HAL porter would be tricky. So it hasn't happened.
Of course anyone is welcome to add HAL-specific MMU fiddling macros for
individual targets/variants/architectures, but something requiring the
amount of analysis that a generic API would require, would need funding
before it happens.
Jifl
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