Objectives

“The ReconOS operating system, programming model and system architecture offers unified operating system services for functions executing in software and hardware and a standardized interface for integrating custom hardware accelerators.

ReconOS leverages the well-established multi-threading programming model and extends a host operating system with support for hardware threads. These extensions allow the hardware threads to interact with software threads using the same, standardized operating system mechanisms, for example, semaphores, mutexes, condition variables, and message queues. From the perspective of an application it is thus completely transparent whether a thread is executing in software or hardware. The availability of an operating system layer providing symmetry between software and hardware threads provides the following benefits for reconfigurable computing systems:

• The application development process can be structured in a step-by-step fashion with an all-in-software implementation as a starting point. Performance-critical application parts can then be turned into hardware threads one-by-one to explore the hardware/software design space successively.

• The portability of applications between different reconfigurable computing systems is improved by using defined operating system interfaces for communication and synchronization instead of low-level platform-specific interfaces.

• The unified appearance of hard and software threads from the application’s perspective allows for moving functions between software and hardware during runtime, which supports the design of adaptive computing systems that exploit partial reconfiguration.”

ReconOS – an operating system approach for reconfigurable computing