Memory mapping

Application software usually benefits from a number of abstractions available in the environment for the handling of memory. In modern operating systems on personal computers, each process can access its own memory space, which can also be relocated by remapping memory blocks to virtual memory addresses. Moreover, dynamic memory allocations are possible through virtual memory pools provided by the kernel. Embedded devices do not rely on these mechanisms, as there is no way to assign virtual addresses to physical memory locations. In all contexts and running modes, all the symbols can be accessed only by pointing at physical addresses.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, booting a bare-metal embedded application requires defining the sections at compile time within the assigned regions in the available address space, using the linker script. In order to properly configure the memory sections in our embedded software, it is important to analyze the properties of...