Designing an operating system for a heterogeneous reconfigurable SoC

Abstract

The emerging need for large amounts of flexible computational power on embedded devices motivated many researchers to incorporate reconfigurable logic together with an instruction-set-processor (ISP) into their architectures. This implies that tomorrow's applications will make use of both the ISP and the reconfigurable logic in order to provide the user with maximum performance. Today, however, a few stumbling blocks prevent these kind of heterogeneous architectures from becoming mainstream. The technology still lacks a form of run-time management infrastructure. This infrastructure should ease application development by shielding the programmer from the complexity of the system and by providing a clear application development API. This paper presents a novel approach for designing an operating system for reconfigurable systems (OS4RS). Creating such an operating system is an integral part of our ongoing research regarding reconfigurable computing. An initial version of our operating system was used to manage a reconfigurable systems demonstrator.0-7695-1926-1/03/$17.00 (C) 2003 IEEE

Architectures and Execution Models for Hardware/Software Compilation and Their System-Level Realization

“…An approach that attempts to achieve ADDRESS is the message-passing interface of [14]. While not described in that work, it appears to be possible to extend the underlying network-on-chip to implement PROTSYS, PROTCODE, and OSSCHED.…”

“…It can be roughly classified into two non-disjunct sets: One set [12], [13], [25], [26], [27] already has fundamental limitations in individual requirements. The second one [12], [13], [14], [15], [29] implements only a subset of our functional requirements. Hence, none of these approaches fully supports any kind of tightlycoupled execution model.…”

Multithreaded virtual-memory-enabled reconfigurable hardware accelerators

“…An advanced OS-based solution [9] introduces a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) responsible for communication between software and hardware. Similarly to our virtualisation layer, the HAL consists of software and hardware components but, it assumes a specific communication scheme based on message passing.…”

Communication-Aware Component Allocation Algorithm for a Hybrid Architecture

“…This is different from [13]. In our approach the migration occurs when the OS component is not being used.…”

“…An example of this trend is the Operating System for Reconfigurable Systems (OS4RS) ( [13]). This work proposes an operating system for a heterogeneous reconfigurable System-on-Chip (SoC).…”