I'm looking at the SoC verification tests for the DFF ram.

This is more a test of the interface to the memory block than a test of the memory itself. Note that the first loop will only look at 40 bytes and the second loop at 20 more bytes. For this to work the linker must be configured so that "ints", "shorts" and "bytes" get allocated at the addresses where the memory block happened to be in the picorv32 address space