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But SPI devices can't be memory mapped --- it's a serial protocol and they can't be attached to the bus. For this to work, something must be converting bus accesses into SPI requests. And then, at least assuming it's not doing an SPI read for every access, it needs to cache the result somewhere... but you've just said it's not doing demand paging?

I am now really confused.




There is a hardware block within the processor that converts memory-bus accesses into SPI accesses (for devices supporting the SPIFI standard for example). This makes the whole SPI device appear to be memory-mapped (for read accesses).


It's got a standard two-way associative cache in front of the SPI interface, much like you might have between RAM and the external bus in a normal CPU. If availabkle, demand paging would be the next step after the data wasn't found there either - a slower, higher-level concept that's handled in software rather than hardware.




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