Communication Consistency for Hardware Context Switch on Heterogeneous FPGAs

International audienceThis work presents the mechanism to guarantee the communication consistency during the context switch on reconfigurable systems. When a task is context switching, both its execution and its communication flow are interrupted. For years, techniques to manage the task context have been proposed, however, little attention has been paid to support communication consistency. To safely interrupt the communication, we introduce a protocol to manage the communication channels of the task while performing the context extraction and restoration. An hybrid CPU-FPGA architecture is used to implement this communication channels management. To evaluate the benfits of the proposed mechanism, experiments are conducted using a Xilinx ZC706 Evaluation Board