Having addresses is bad style

[mithro]

Currently the published reference manual has the address of things like CSR registers displayed everywhere.

This will eventually make everyone sad. It will make your developers sad when the addresses change. It will make the gateware developers sad when they are forced to put in horrible hacks to deal with trying to keep addresses the same. It'll make users sad when they get stuff which doesn't work.

If you don't use dynamic address values you are also going to spend a lot more LUTs on things like address decoding.

It is better to embrace the fact these addresses are dynamic and teach people to not hard code them.

[xobs]

That's by design.

This is a reference manual for a SoC that's guaranteed to not change. It's firmware, and is designed to be used by end-customers. They get sad when things change, because their software stops working. In fact, we need to document these things more -- including memory regions and their offsets.

Having dynamic addresses is probably fine for a bios file that gets built as part of the firmware, but as soon as you load user-facing code you need things to stop moving around.

For example, I'm working on a crate for Rust to enable the use of Rust in Fomu. This usually accepts an SVD file, which requires address offsets be fixed. If I publish one of these crates to crates.io, then those addresses are fixed and should never be changed.

It's not possible to not hard code them and still be able to work with precompiled files. So it's better to hard code them and document what they are.