Glossary
ARM DUI 0553A
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Glossary-2
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a byte at a halfword-aligned address is the most significant byte within the halfword at
that address.
See also
.
Breakpoint
A breakpoint is a mechanism provided by debuggers to identify an instruction at which program
execution is to be halted. Breakpoints are inserted by the programmer to enable inspection of
register contents, memory locations, variable values at fixed points in the program execution to
test that the program is operating correctly. Breakpoints are removed after the program is
successfully tested.
Byte-invariant
In a byte-invariant system, the address of each byte of memory remains unchanged when
switching between little-endian and big-endian operation. When a data item larger than a byte
is loaded from or stored to memory, the bytes making up that data item are arranged into the
correct order depending on the endianness of the memory access. An ARM byte-invariant
implementation also supports unaligned halfword and word memory accesses. It expects
multi-word accesses to be word-aligned.
Cache
A block of on-chip or off-chip fast access memory locations, situated between the processor and
main memory, used for storing and retrieving copies of often used instructions, data, or
instructions and data. This is done to greatly increase the average speed of memory accesses and
so improve processor performance.
Condition field
A four-bit field in an instruction that specifies a condition under which the instruction can
execute.
Conditional execution
If the condition code flags indicate that the corresponding condition is true when the instruction
starts executing, it executes normally. Otherwise, the instruction does nothing.
Context
The environment that each process operates in for a multitasking operating system. In ARM
processors, this is limited to mean the physical address range that it can access in memory and
the associated memory access permissions.
Coprocessor
A processor that supplements the main processor. The Cortex-M4 processor does not support
any coprocessors.
Debugger
A debugging system that includes a program, used to detect, locate, and correct software faults,
together with custom hardware that supports software debugging.
Direct Memory Access (DMA)
An operation that accesses main memory directly, without the processor performing any
accesses to the data concerned.
Doubleword
A 64-bit data item. The contents are taken as being an unsigned integer unless otherwise stated.
Doubleword-aligned
A data item having a memory address that is divisible by eight.
Endianness
Byte ordering. The scheme that determines the order that successive bytes of a data word are
stored in memory. An aspect of the systems memory mapping.
See also
Little-endian and Big-endian
Exception
An event that interrupts program execution. When an exception occurs, the processor suspends
the normal program flow and starts execution at the address indicated by the corresponding
exception vector. The indicated address contains the first instruction of the handler for the
exception.