Design And Implementation Of Runtime Operating System For Fpga-based Reconfigurable Computers

With the advancing in technology, the conventional computer architecture and resolutions can not satisfy the incoming demand of performance, and the multiprocessor and multicore architecture will be the mainstream. Recently, FPGA applications develop fast. As the reconfigurable method and implementation used on FPGA make a great breakthrough, it is paving another way to solve our computing problems.Conventionally, except for CPU, the computing resource in system is viewed as I/O device or coprocessor. While the emerging of the reconfigurable techs on FPGA make it possible to treat the reconfigurable fabrics as the other computing resource compared with CPU in system, so as to improve the hardware's advantage of tackling the compute-intensive tasks. However, the traditional design method restricts this application. Therefore, some researchers put forward the idea of using hardware task model to organize FPGA, thus conquering its limitation of being the computing resource.This thesis explores the software/hardware tasks hybrid system both theoretically and technically, evaluates different design methods, and purposes an OS design method that OS could schedule hardware tasks on the run time. In order to be compatible and scalable, we choose Xilinx Virtex series chips and Linux OS as the hardware and software platform. The former is the largest FPGA manufacturer, the latter is widely used UNIX semantics OS.In the implementation, we modified Linux OS,thus allowing user transparently to see hardware process in the user space, and also implementing the run-time hardware scheduling.The final part of this thesis concludes the thought of design, and points out insufficiency and progress in this system, at last brings forth potential improvements of system as well as the next research directions.