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

Abstract

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 provides communication links with running hardware processes. Increased productivities have been observed for high-level application developers, who have few previous experiences in hardware design, to implement complex mixed software/ hardware designs on a FPGA-based reconfigurable computer running BORPH.

ReconOS: An RTOS Supporting Hard-and Software Threads

“…The preferred method of communication between the CPU and a hardware process relies on the MicroBlaze's Fast Simplex Links and maps them to Linux FIFOs on the file system level [12]. Another Linux-based run-time environment for reconfigurable hardware, called BORPH, has been developed by So et al [13] [14]. BORPH modifies and extends a standard Linux kernel for the PowerPC architecture with a hardware interface, providing conventional UNIX IPC mechanisms to the hardware using a message passing network.…”

A Scalable Correlator Architecture Based on Modular FPGA Hardware, Reuseable Gateware, and Data Packetization

“…On top of this framework, we run Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware (BORPH)-an extension of the Linux operating system that provides kernel support for FPGA resources (So & Brodersen 2006;So 2007). This system allows FPGA configurations to be run in the same fashion as software processes, and creates a virtual file system representing the memories and registers defined on the FPGA.…”

PetaOp/Second FPGA Signal Processing for SETI and Radio Astronomy

“…On top of this Linux framework, we run BORPH, which extends the Linux operating system to provide kernel support for FPGA resources [3,4]. This framework supersedes the TinySH shell and allows hardware processes on FPGA resources to be run in the same fashion as software processes on conventional processor-based systems.…”