Ufdjrw

I run 64 bit python on a 64 bits arm processor.
One on the AXI bus of this processor is connected to a FPGA (which does bus and clock domain changes down to a 32 bit wide bus).
This piece of hardware does not like 64 bit accesses...

I am trying to access this FPGA via python mmap like this (within a class):

def __init__(self, base, len):
 self.base = base
 self.fd = open("/dev/mem", "r+")
 self.lw = mmap.mmap(self.fd.fileno(),
 len,
 mmap.MAP_SHARED,
 mmap.PROT_READ | mmap.PROT_WRITE,
 offset=base)

def get_U32(self, offset):
 s = self.lw[offset:offset+4]
 return struct.unpack("<I", s)[0]

The idea was to that get_U32() would read a 32 bit word from the bus (hence the offset to offset+4 reading).
Sadly, it seems that mmap performs a 64 bit access to the bus anyway (some kind of caching for performance optimization I assume) and then performs the 32 bit "casting". The underlying FPGA is not happy...

In a C program, I simply write:

data = *((uint32_t *) address);

...and the CPU seems to gently perform a 32 bit access on its AXI bus, which the underlying hardware prefers....
(so right now, I have a (slow) workaround, where python requires a C program to interface the Hardware, via pipes)

Is there a way to force 64 bits python to perform a 32 bit access, as the previous C line obviously succeeds with?

The question is written about reading 32 bits here, but of course, writing 32 bits is needed as well...

Based on the idea from @martineau, the double probe can be fixed using python ctypes, like:

s = ctypes.c_uint32.from_buffer(self.lw, offset).value #read

or

types.c_uint32.from_buffer(self.lw, offset).value = s #write

This does indeed seem to force python into doing the same 32 bit access as in C, and remove the double read or write probe at the 32 bit bus.

However, sadly, python seems to do a read before each write.
So the solution above works perfectly for reading, but when writing, I still get a read access before the write access. In C, I can, of course just get a single write access when writing.

I am posting this for others who may be interested. If you have a solution to this last issue (read before write), please post it.