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Cortex-A8 Technical Reference Manual - ARM Information Center

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2.14.6 The E bit<br />

2.14.7 The A bit<br />

2.14.8 The control bits<br />

Programmers Model<br />

<strong>ARM</strong> and Thumb instructions are provided to set and clear the E bit. The E bit controls<br />

load/store endianness. The E bit can be initialized at reset using the CFGEND0 input. See<br />

Chapter 4 Unaligned Data and Mixed-endian Data Support for details of the E bit. See<br />

Miscellaneous signals on page A-8 for details on the CFGEND0 signal.<br />

The A bit is set to 1 automatically. It is used to disable imprecise data aborts. It might not be<br />

writable in the Nonsecure state if the AW bit in the SCR register is reset.<br />

The bottom eight bits of a PSR are known collectively as the control bits. They are the:<br />

• Interrupt disable bits<br />

• T bit<br />

• Mode bits on page 2-25.<br />

The control bits change when an exception occurs. When the processor is operating in a<br />

privileged mode, software can manipulate these bits.<br />

Interrupt disable bits<br />

The I and F bits are the interrupt disable bits:<br />

• When the I bit is set to 1, IRQ interrupts are disabled.<br />

• When the F bit is set to 1, FIQ interrupts are disabled. FIQ can be nonmaskable in the<br />

Nonsecure state if the FW bit in SCR register is reset.<br />

Note<br />

You can change the SPSR F bit in the Nonsecure state but this does not update the CPSR if the<br />

SCR bit [4] FW does not permit it.<br />

T bit<br />

The T bit reflects the operating state:<br />

• when the T bit is set to 1, the processor is executing in Thumb state or ThumbEE state<br />

depending on the J bit<br />

• when the T bit is cleared to 0, the processor is executing in <strong>ARM</strong> state.<br />

Note<br />

Never use an MSR instruction to force a change to the state of the T bit in the CPSR. If an MSR<br />

instruction does try to modify this bit the result is architecturally Unpredictable. In the<br />

processor, this bit is not affected.<br />

<strong>ARM</strong> DDI 0344K Copyright © 2006-2010 <strong>ARM</strong> Limited. All rights reserved. 2-24<br />

ID060510 Non-Confidential

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