Olumide wrote On 02/01/06 10:49,:
Hi -

I know memory mapped IO is about mapping device/controller registers to
memory space in order to reduce the number of processor instructions
(and simplify device driver writing) . My question is: are device
registers mapped to virtual memory or physical memory? I suspect the
former, and I have looked up a number of texts but everyone just seems
to skirt about the issue.

How could device registers inhabit virtual memory?
That'd require every device to be sensitive to the MMU,
would insert the device registers into every process'
address space, would make machines with multiple CPUs
(more specifically, multiple MMUs) either impossible or
woefully inefficient, would make it impossible or very
difficult to change MMU settings while any device was
active, and would bring about the end of civilization as
we know it ;-) Device registers inhabit physical memory
space; devices that do DMA generally do so to and from
physical-memory buffers.

That said, the CPU usually reads and writes virtual
addresses that are translated to physical addresses by
the MMU. So if the CPU is to access device registers,
it must configure the MMU so that it has a virtual-to-
physical mapping that associates some virtual address
with the physical address of the target register. In
that sense, device registers inhabit virtual memory --
but in that sense, RAM inhabits virtual memory, too.

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