[eckzow]

Fair enough. The Cortex-M's that I've dealt with have generally been homed inside some larger chip, and so the "reset pin" notion was a bit more vague, and in such an environment ARM's stance makes a bit more sense as you really want the reset to reset the "subsystem" (including whatever other random hardware you glued to yourself today).

It's also true that ARM has heard some of these complaints, which is why there were steps toward standardizing some things--like, the SYSTICK interface--in v7-M. It's really been a step up since the ARM7TDMI, and I hope that it will continue with v8-M or whatever the next revision ends up being.

Personally, when I'm dealing with a discrete chip and I need to reset it I've found that the most reliable methods that don't set off the hack-o-meter too badly are to wait for or directly invoke watchdog hardware... but yes, that's essentially always device specific.

[ChuckMcM]

That is a very good point! If you are building some SoC and the CPU is just some small part of it, "system reset" can in fact be a very vague notion. I hadn't really been thinking that way and in that context the ARM position does make sense. As another person pointed out offline there is the watchdog timer, if you wanted you could set it and halt. Then it would kick you with a reset.