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Multicast memory regions

A project log for F-CPU

The Freedom CPU project has a log here too now :-)

yann-guidon-ygdesYann Guidon / YGDES 12/01/2018 at 12:270 Comments

As already stated, F-CPU enforces a strong separation between the data and instruction memory spaces. This is a central requirement because this processor will run user-provided (or worse: 3rd party) code and security must not be an afterthought.

Another security measure is to ensure that each data block can be accessed by only one thread. Zero-copy information sharing happens when one thread "yields" a block to another thread, as a payload of a message for example. At that point, the original owner loses ownership and rights to that block, that must be previously allocated from a dynamic pool. This ensures (ideally) that no information is leaked (as long as the allocator clears the blocks after use).

There are also "hard" semaphores in the Special Registers space, with a scratch area where appropriate read and write rights allow deadlock-free operation.

But there are still cases where this is not enough and zero-copy operation is impossible or too cumbersome. In a few cases, the overhead of yielding a block is too high and we would like one thread to be able to write to a buffer while other threads can read it. Without this feature, the system is forced to clump data into a message packet, which adds latency. This is multiplied by the number of interested recipients but the added cost would not be justified if this specific update is not required at the moment. It would be faster and lighter to read some word here and there from time to time.

This desired "multicast" feature is reminiscent of a system that must be somehow implemented : ONE thread is allowed to write to the instruction space, to load programs, and this space may be shared by several threads. However, all the other threads can't access the program space, and shared constants (read-only values) must exist in the data addressing space, a multicast system is required anyway.

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