Cooperative Multithreading in Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems

Preemptive multitasking, a popular technique for time-sharing of computational resources in software-based sys-tems, faces considerable difficulties when applied to par-tially reconfigurable hardware. In this paper, we propose a cooperative scheduling technique for reconfigurable hard-ware threads as a feasible compromise between computa-tional efficiency and implementation complexity. We have implemented this mechanism for the multithreaded recon-figurable operating system ReconOS and evaluated its over-heads and performance on a prototype. 1