Operating systems for fpga based computers and their memory management

Abstract: We introduce the concept of an operating system for platforms that consist beside memory and peripheral devices of FPGAs as the only computational resource. Applications can be developed independent from each other and due to device drivers with little dependency on the platform. The OS supports the multitasking execution of applications using static as well as dynamic resource assignment. A main focus of the paper is the management of the resource memory. Memory management as part of the OS is introduced which allows multiple tasks to access the same memory banks using virtual addressing and dynamic memory allocation. Access conflicts are solved by a priority based scheduling. Since no microprocessor is part of the system, the entire OS including its memory management is executed on the FPGAs. 1 1 Introduction and Related Work Reconfigurable hardware devices such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and coarse grain architectures are general purpose computing devices. Consequently, we can build up computer systems which use reconfigurable hardware devices instead of micro-processors as main computing resource