Summary
Memory management in an embedded system is the source of the most critical bugs, and for this reason, particular attention must be dedicated to designing and implementing the correct solutions for the platform in use and application purposes. The execution stack should be carefully placed, sized, and delimited when possible.
Systems not providing dynamic allocations are safer, but embedded systems with higher complexity benefit from dynamic allocation techniques. Programmers must be aware that errors in memory handling can be critical for a system and very difficult to spot, so extra care is required when code handles dynamically allocated pointers.
The MPU can be a vital tool to enforce access permissions and attributes on memory regions, and it can be used for several purposes. In the example shown, we implemented an MPU-based mechanism to enforce a physical boundary for the stack pointer.
In the next chapter, we will examine other common components included in modern...
