Virtual memory for real-time systems using hPMP

Abstract

To satisfy automotive safety and security requirements, memory protection mechanisms are an essential component of automotive microcontrollers. In today's available systems, either a fully physical address-based protection is implemented utilizing a memory protection unit, or a memory management unit takes care of memory protection while also mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses. The possibility to develop software using a large virtual address space, which is agnostic to the underlying physical address space, allows for easier software development and integration, especially in the context of virtualization. In this work, we showcase an extension to the current RISC-V SPMP proposal that enables address redirection for selected address regions, while maintaining the fully deterministic behavior of a memory protection unit.