TOWARDS RUN-TIME PARTITIONING OF A REAL TIME OPERATING SYSTEM FOR RECONFIGURABLE SYSTEMS ON CHIPThis work was developed in the course of the Special Research Initiative 614 - Self-optimizing Concepts and Structures in Mechanical Engineering - University of Paderborn, and was published on its behalf and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Abstract

Reconfigurable computing have successfully been designed taking into advantage the supporting of architectures based on the FPGAs and CPU. Moreover, the new hybrid FPGAs (e.g. Virtex-II Pro™), provides a hardcore general-purpose processor (GPP) embedded into a field of programmable gate arrays. Together with the ability to be partially reconfigured, those chips are very attractive for implementation of run-time reconfigurable embedded systems. However, most of the efforts in this field were made in order to apply these capabilities at application level, leaving to the Operating System (OS) the provision of the necessary mechanisms to support these applications. This paper present an approach for run-time reconfigurable Operating System, which take advantage of the new hybrid FPGA chips to reconfigure itself based on online estimation of application demands. The paper focus on run-time assignment and reconfiguration of OS services over a hybrid architecture. The proposed model uses a 0-1 Integer programming strategy for assigning OS components over a hybrid architecture, as well as an alternative heuristic algorithm for it. In addition, the evaluation of the reconfiguration costs are presented and discussed.