Generic operating-system support for FPGAs

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are by now common in industrial applications and research. The industry utilizes FPGAs for prototyping, small scale hardware productions, and telecommunication hardware. The deployment of FPGAs in research is often High Performance Computing (HPC) centric. But FPGAs are not used in General Purpose Computing (GPC) very often because of many factors, including missing Operating System (OS) support. This paper presents the idea of integrating FPGAs in OSs for standard personal computers, such as Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. The goal of this integration is improving the acceptance of hardware acceleration for applications within software companies through separating hardware and software completely, and an easy hard- and software Application Programming Interface (API). Another goal is to improve the acceptance of FPGAs at the end-user by reducing the connection complexity of FPGAs and standard personal computers. The user should use them just by plug and play. To achieve these goals the paper introduces OS support for identifying and configuring FPGAs without vendor specific tools, and for bidirectional communication between the host computer and components configured inside the FPGA.