In this PR we address the incredibly broken target halting for memory access heuristic, replacing it fully with a TOPT which can be set on targets that are confirmed to work without bad reads, CPU halts or perturbed timings (such as stolen bus cycles that upset hard real-time applications).
For now this is only enabled on RISC-V targets that use the System Bus mechanism for memory access as that's guaranteed to be okay by the RISC-V Debug specification, however it can be easily enabled for targets where it's confirmed okay by simply adding target->target_options |= TOPT_NON_HALTING_MEM_IO; in the probe routine for that target.
This method has been chosen on account of how difficult it is to find out if a target can do this correctly, and the numerous counter-examples shown for, eg, saying "all Cortex-M are okay" as this is not true on the Tiva-C series, instantly striking down this statement and requiring a narrower enablement. Before a target can be enabled as allowing non-halting memory I/O it must be shown to: be able to read memory correctly without halting (this is the problem for the Tiva-C, you will get back garbled reads if you try this); be able to read without halting the CPU (eg, checking SysTick timings); be able to show that the reads to not perturb the CPU using the bus (indication of stolen cycles) in a way that throws off timings (eg, by wiggling a GPIO in a loop).
With this change done, some sort of memory monitoring command becomes possible as was being requested/talked about in #1532 and Koen's PRs for "memwatch". These were not taken before as it introduced obvious unsafety into the code on account it did not block reading on Cortex-A/R targets where, short of the vendor providing a secondary AP for memory I/O, it is not possible to do a non-halting read, and this heuristic did not stop attempts on RISC-V parts that use the Abstract Command mechanism or progbuf mechanism for access.
💯 we're glad to have got this heuristic situation fixed as well as it'd been bothering us as we do actually want to see more features for memory debugging merged, just.. safely!
Detailed description
In this PR we address the incredibly broken target halting for memory access heuristic, replacing it fully with a TOPT which can be set on targets that are confirmed to work without bad reads, CPU halts or perturbed timings (such as stolen bus cycles that upset hard real-time applications).
For now this is only enabled on RISC-V targets that use the System Bus mechanism for memory access as that's guaranteed to be okay by the RISC-V Debug specification, however it can be easily enabled for targets where it's confirmed okay by simply adding
target->target_options |= TOPT_NON_HALTING_MEM_IO;
in the probe routine for that target.This method has been chosen on account of how difficult it is to find out if a target can do this correctly, and the numerous counter-examples shown for, eg, saying "all Cortex-M are okay" as this is not true on the Tiva-C series, instantly striking down this statement and requiring a narrower enablement. Before a target can be enabled as allowing non-halting memory I/O it must be shown to: be able to read memory correctly without halting (this is the problem for the Tiva-C, you will get back garbled reads if you try this); be able to read without halting the CPU (eg, checking SysTick timings); be able to show that the reads to not perturb the CPU using the bus (indication of stolen cycles) in a way that throws off timings (eg, by wiggling a GPIO in a loop).
With this change done, some sort of memory monitoring command becomes possible as was being requested/talked about in #1532 and Koen's PRs for "memwatch". These were not taken before as it introduced obvious unsafety into the code on account it did not block reading on Cortex-A/R targets where, short of the vendor providing a secondary AP for memory I/O, it is not possible to do a non-halting read, and this heuristic did not stop attempts on RISC-V parts that use the Abstract Command mechanism or progbuf mechanism for access.
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