9. Physical Memory Protection (PMP)

The Physical Memory Protection unit is compliant with the RISC-V Instruction Set Manual, Volume II: Privileged Architecture, Version 1.11. The unit provides machine-mode controlled registers to allow physical memory access privileges (read, write, execute) to be specified for each physical memory region. The hart supports upto 4 regions

Overlapping regions are permitted and region locking is also supported. Once a region is locked, further writes to the CSRs are ignored by the core. The locked entries can only be unlocked via a reset of the hart.

Note

When a region is locked, the read/write/execute permissions are enforced onto machine mode accesses as well.

9.1. PMP Granularity

The PMP granularity parameter is used to reduce the size of the address matching comparators by increasing the minimum region size. The minimum granularity is 8 bytes and thus NA4 is not a valid option. This choice has been made to reduce the overheads of checking homogeneity of the access.