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Fast Models Foundation Platform FVP 11.20 Release Notes
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Copyright (C) 2017,2018,2019,2022 ARM Limited, All rights reserved

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Introduction
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This Foundation Platform provides a basic Arm v8/v9 platform environment suitable
for running bare metal semi-hosted applications, and Linux OS booting.

Model overview
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The platform provides:

- An Armv8-A or Armv9-A processor cluster with 1-4 CPUs
- 8GB of RAM
- 4 PL011 UARTs exposed as host TCP sockets
- Platform peripherals including a Real-time clock, Watchdog timer,
  Read-time timer and Power controller
- Secure peripherals including a Trusted watchdog, Random number generator,
  Non-volatile counters and Root-key storage
- A network device model connected to host network resources
- A block storage device implemented as a file on the host
- A small system register block
- A CLCD that allows GUI visualization
- Debug capabilities by enabling a CADI server

The Armv8-A processor model implements:

- AArch64 at all exception levels
- AArch32 support at EL0/EL1
- Little and big endian at all exception levels
- Generic timers
- Self-hosted debug
- GICv2 and optional GICv3 memory mapped CPU interfaces and distributor
- No support for Thumb2EE
- No support for Crypto extensions
- Armv8 versions 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and 8.6
- Scalable Vector Extension

The models runs as fast as possible unless all the CPUs in the cluster are
in WFI/WFE, in which case the model idles until an interrupt or external
event occurs.

Caches are modelled as stateless and there is no write buffer. This gives
the effect of perfect memory coherence on the data side. The instruction
side has a variable size prefetch buffer so requires correct barriers to
be used in target code to operate correctly.

There are two styles of network support:

NAT, IPv4 based networking provides limited IP connectivity by using user
level IP services. This requires no extra privileges to set up or use but
has inherent limitations. System level services, or services conflicting
with those on the host can be provided using port remapping.

Bridged networking requires the setup of an Ethernet bridge device. This
usually requires administrator privileges. See the documentation in the
Linux bridge-utils package for more details.

The Foundation Platform expects visualization (LCD and other model status)
to be available. Running from an environment where visualization is not
possible (for example, a Linux terminal without an X server) is not
supported.

Documentation and support
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All model configuration is provided by command line arguments. Run the model
with the --help command line option to get a summary of the available
commands.

Further model documentation including the modelled peripherals, system memory
maps, interrupt routing and semi-hosting support can be found in the
Foundation Platform User Guide:
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100961/latest/

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What is supported
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The Foundation Platform supports the following operating systems:

* RedHat Enterprise Linux 7
* RedHat Enterprise Linux 8
* Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
* Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

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Feedback and support
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Arm does not offer direct customer support for the Foundation Platform. For
technical support use the Arm support forums, https://community.arm.com/groups/tools.

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Limitations
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This version of the model has the following issues and limitations:

NAT (aka user mode) network support has known issues which cause networking
to intermittently slow down.

The processor reports an MIDR with 0x41 as the implementer code, 0xF as the
architecture code, 0xD00 as the part number, and the major and minor revision
of the model.

UARTs cannot be configured as enabled at reset. Bootloaders will need to do
this manually.

Date:  2022/12/01 18:04:14 GMT
Build: 11.20:15

Confidential

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