Nios II Classic Processor Reference Guide

ID 683620
Date 10/28/2016
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.3.2. Overlapping Regions

The memory addresses of regions can overlap. Overlapping regions have several uses including placing markers or small holes inside of a larger region. For example, the stack and heap may be located in the same region, growing from opposite ends of the address range. To detect stack/heap overflows, you can define a small region between the stack and heap with no access permissions and assign it a higher priority than the larger region. Any access attempts to the hole region trigger an exception informing system software about the stack/heap overflow.

If regions overlap so that a particular access matches more than one region, the region with the highest priority (lowest index) determines the access permissions and default cacheability.