Fixed address variable in C

Question

For embedded applications, it is often necessary to access fixed memory locations for peripheral registers. The standard way I have found to do this is something like the f

Answer 1

This depends a bit on what OS you are using. I'm guessing you are using something like DOS or vxWorks. Generally the system will have certian areas of the memory space reserved for hardware, and compilers for that platform will always be smart enough to avoid those areas for their own allocations. Otherwise you'd be continually writing random garbage to disk or line printers when you meant to be accessing variables.

In case something else was confusing you, I should also point out that #define is a preprocessor directive. No code gets generated for that. It just tells the compiler to textually replace any foo_reg it sees in your source file with *(int *)0x100. It is no different than just typing *(int *)0x100 in yourself everywhere you had foo_reg, other than it may look cleaner.

What I'd probably do instead (in a modern C compiler) is:

// access register 'foo_reg', which is located at address 0x100
const int* foo_reg = (int *)0x100;
*foo_reg = 1;  // write to foo_regint 
x = *foo_reg;  // read from foo_reg