6 Machine Configuration Description
RISC-V platforms may contain myriad devices, processor cores, and configuration parameters. To support higher-level software, including bootloaders and operating systems, it is recommended that hardware platforms embed a description of their components in read-only memory that is directly accessible after processor reset for use by low-level system software, external debuggers, or manufacturing test procedures. We call this low-level embedded information a configuration description. We define here a standard mechanism to encode and locate the configuration information, and to determine the format of the configuration information.
6.1 Configuration String Search Procedure
The platform must describe how to locate a pointer to find this string, for example, by specifying a fixed physical address at which the pointer resides. To support a wide variety of platforms, configuration formats, and chips with manufacturing-time programming of configuration options, a flexible search procedure is defined to locate the configuration information seeded by the initial pointer specified by the platform.
The configuration string pointer provided by the platform points to an initial memory address at which the search for configuration string begins.
The configuration string cannot begin with a padding byte, where a
padding byte is defined to contain either 0x0 or 0xff, but
can be preceded by up to 63 padding bytes that are ignored. If 64
padding bytes are encountered, then the search terminates without
finding a config string.
The padding bytes represent common values returned by unpopulated memory or bus regions or unprogrammed non-volatile memory. Configuration strings can therefore include pointers to regions that are optionally populated or programmed, and these regions will be ignored if there is nothing present. The padding bytes also support alignment of binary data structures.
Otherwise the first non-padding byte is the beginning of the
configuration information. For example, configuration information in
Device Tree String format would begin with a “/dts-v1/”.
Configuration information in Flattened Device Tree format would begin
with the magic number 0xd00dfeed. Configuration information in
the config string format would begin with “/cs-v1/”.
Config string is a new format that is backwards-compatible with device tree string (as far as DTS specs exist) but can include additional configuration information in other memory regions.
To reduce porting effort for OS boots, we have reverted back to using Device Trees to communicate platform information to the kernel, so this chapter is out of date. Config string was designed for other uses in addition, but for now, we are staying with a standard device tree model.