• State Not Answered
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 3 replies
  • Subscribers 21 subscribers
  • Views 1202 views
  • Users 0 members are here
2025 survey

We are running a survey to help us improve the experience for all of our members. If you see the survey appear, please take the time to tell us about your experience if you can.

Options
How was your experience today?
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Why Doesn’t FVP Initialize Unused Memory to Zero (e.g., 0xcfdfdfdfdfdfdfcf)?

Qingyu Ma

I have a question about FVP (Fixed Virtual Platform) and its memory initialization behavior. Specifically, I noticed that unused memory in FVP is not set to 0, but instead contains non-zero values like 0xcfdfdfdfdfdfdfcf.

For example, when reading a non-used memory area in FVP, the values appear as non-zero by default. This behavior can lead to issues, such as:

  • If the OS running on FVP does not explicitly clear the .bss section, global variables in the OS could end up initialized with these non-zero default values.
  • This, in turn, may cause unexpected behavior or bugs during execution.

Given that FVP operates in a virtualized memory environment, I’m wondering why it doesn’t simply initialize all memory to zero. Is there a specific design rationale or technical limitation for this behavior?

0