
98 Embedded systems design
The basic idea behind a memory protection unit is to police
the memory subsystem so that only approved memory accesses
can take place. If a memory access is made to a protected area by
software that does not have the correct access rights, an error
signal is generated which can be used to start supervisor level
software to decide what to do.
The ARM architecture memory protection unit
The ARM architecture memory protection unit performs
this function. It can divide the memory range into eight separate
regions. Each region can be as small as 4 kbytes up to 4 Gbyte and
its starting address must be on a region boundary. If region ...