Virtualizable hardware/software design infrastructure for dynamically partially reconfigurable systems

Abstract

In most existing works, reconfigurable hardware modules are still managed as conventional hardware devices. Further, the software reconfiguration overhead incurred by loading corresponding device drivers into the kernel of an operating system has been overlooked until now. As a result, the enhancement of system performance and the utilization of reconfigurable hardware modules are still quite limited. This work proposes a virtualizable hardware/software design infrastructure (VDI) for dynamically partially reconfigurable systems. Besides the gate-level hardware virtualization provided by the partial reconfiguration technology, VDI supports the device-level hardware virtualization. In VDI, a reconfigurable hardware module can be virtualized such that it can be accessed efficiently by multiple applications in an interleaving way. A Hot-Plugin Connector (HPC) replaces the conventional device driver, such that it not only assists the device-level hardware virtualization but can also be reused across different hardware modules. To facilitate hardware/software communication and to enhance system scalability, the proposed VDI is realized as a hierarchical design framework. User-designed reconfigurable hardware modules can be easily integrated into VDI, and are then executed as hardware tasks in an operating system for reconfigurable systems (OS4RS). A dynamically partially reconfigurable network security system was designed using VDI, which demonstrated a higher utilization of reconfigurable hardware modules and a reduction by up to 12.83% of the processing time required by using the conventional method in a dynamically partially reconfigurable system.