Reconhgurable Hardware Operating Systems: From Design Concepts to Realizations

摘要

In this paper, we approach the rather new area of reconfigurable hardware operating systems in a top-down manner. First, we describe a design concept that defines basic abstractions and operating system services in a device-independent way. Then, we refine this model to an implementation concept on the Xilinx Virtex XCV-800 technology. The implementation concept proposes a multitasking environment that executes relocatable hardware tasks, uses a memory management unit translating task requests to internal and external memory accesses, and relies on device drivers and triggers to connect to external I/O. Finally, we present a prototypical implementation and an application case study. The application consists of a set of dynamically loaded and executed networking and multimedia tasks such as IP packet processing, AES decryption, and audio stream decoding.