Towards Real-Time Operating Systems for Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Platforms

Heterogeneous platforms equipped with processors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) can be exploited to accelerate specific functions triggered by software activities. Thanks to dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) capabilities of modern FPGAs, such functions can be programmed at run-time, thus opening a new dimension in the resource management problems for such platforms. To properly exploit the DPR feature, novel operating system supports are needed. With the aim of investigating this direction, we developed a prototype implementation of a timesharing mechanism that can be used to dynamically reconfigure predefined FPGA areas for accelerating different functions associated with real-time recurrent tasks. This work reports some preliminary experimental studies conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach, profile the temporal parameters involved in such systems (e.g., reconfiguration and execution times) and identify possible bottlenecks. The achieved results are encouraging and clearly show that, in spite of the relatively high reconfiguration times of FPGAs, a timesharing mechanism can significantly improve the performance of real-time applications with respect to fully static approaches.