Many ARM processors have on-chip memory management systems, such as MMUs or MPUs. These devices are normally set up and enabled during system startup. Therefore, the initialization sequence of processors with local memory systems requires special consideration.

As described in this chapter, C library initialization code in __main is responsible for setting up the execution time memory map of the image. Therefore, the run-time memory view of the processor must be set up before branching to __main. This means that any MMU or MPU must be set up and enabled in the reset handler.

TCMs must also be enabled before branching to __main, normally before MMU/MPU setup, because you generally want to scatter-load code and data into TCMs. You must be careful that you do not have to access memory that is masked by the TCMs when they are enabled.

You also risk problems with cache coherency if caches are enabled before branching to __main. Code in __main copies code regions from their load address to their execution address, essentially treating instructions as data. As a result, some instructions can be cached in the data cache, in which case they are not visible to the instruction path.

To avoid these coherency problems, enable caches after the C library initialization sequence finishes executing.