Physical Memory Protection (PMP)

The Physical Memory Protection (PMP) unit implements region-based memory access checking in-accordance with the RISC-V Privileged Specification, version 1.12 and implements the PMP Enhancements for memory access and execution prevention on Machine mode (Smepmp) version 1.0 extension. The following configuration parameters are available to control PMP checking:

Parameter	Default value	Description
PMPEnable	0	PMP support enabled
PMPNumRegions	4	Number of implemented regions (1 - 16)
PMPGranularity	0	Minimum match granularity \(2^{G+2}\) bytes (0 - 31)

When PMPEnable is zero, the PMP module is not instantiated and all PMP registers read as zero (regardless of the value of PMPNumRegions)

PMP Integration

Addresses from the instruction fetch unit and load-store unit are passed to the PMP module for checking, and the output of the PMP check is used to gate the external request. To maintain consistency with external errors, the instruction fetch unit and load-store unit progress with their request as if it was granted externally. The PMP error is registered and consumed by the core when the data would have been consumed.

PMP Granularity

The PMP granularity parameter is used to reduce the size of the address matching comparators by increasing the minimum region size. When the granularity is greater than zero, NA4 mode is not available and will be treated as OFF mode.

PMP Enhancements

These are described in more detail in PMP Enhancements for memory access and execution prevention on Machine mode (Smepmp) version 1.0. If Ibex is configured to include PMP (PMPEnable is not zero) the PMP enhancements are always included. Use of the enhanced behavior is optional, if no writes to mseccfg occur PMP behavior will remain exactly as if Smepmp was not implemented. The enhancements add:

A new CSR mseccfg providing functionality to allow locked regions to be modified and to implement default deny for M-mode accesses.
New PMP region configurations which are U-Mode or M-Mode accessible only with varying read/write/execute settings along with some shared U and M mode accessible configurations. These new configurations supersede the original ones and are enabled via mseccfg.

Custom Reset Values

By default all PMP CSRs (include mseccfg) are reset to 0. Some applications may want other reset values. Default reset values are defined in ibex_pkg.sv. An implementation can either modify this file or pass custom reset values as a module parameter.

Debug Mode

In debug mode, the PMP allows all accesses to addresses of the Debug Module, as defined by the DmBaseAddr and DmAddrMask module parameters. This is mandated by the RISC-V Debug Specification (v1.0.0).