mitch writes:

BTW, the way I solved this in my ISA/Architecture; is to define an "Allocated"
bit in the PTEs (My architecture comes out of reset with the MMU turned on
and paging enabled--there is actually no means to disable the MMU).

The Allocated PTE bit tells the cache hierarchy that this line will not be migrated
outside of the caches. The line can migrate up from L2 to L1 or migrate down 
from L1 to L2 but is not allowed to migrate farther out than L2.

So I can now use the memory of the caches as a place to store data while 
DRAM gets initialized, and configured, counted, bundled, and handed over
to the OS later boot processes.