Improving Usability of FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Computers Through Operating System Support

Advances in FPGA-based reconfigurable computers have made them a viable computing platform for a vast variety of computation demanding areas such as bioinformatics, speech recognition, and high-end digital signal processing. The lack of common, intuitive operating system support, however, hinders their wide deployment. This paper presents BORPH, an operating system framework for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers with a goal to ease and accelerate development of high-level applications to run on these computers. It provides kernel support for FPGA resources by extending a standard Linux operating system. Users therefore compile and execute hardware processes on FPGA resources the same way they run software processes on conventional processor-based systems. The operating system offers run-time general file system support to hardware processes as if they were software. Furthermore, a virtual file system is built to allow access to memories and registers defined in the FPGA, which provi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: FPL
• Authors: Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Robert W. Brodersen
• Keywords: FPGA-based Reconfigurable Computers, FPL 2006, Hardware, Hardware Processes, Operating System