Development and Implementation of OS Functions for a Computer System Having FPGA Devices as Reconfigurable Resources

Many researchers and companies have been interested in computer systems which have reconfigurable devices as programmable resources. Current Reconfigurable systems (RC systems) are basically single task systems, but the number of reconfigurable devices in these systems has increased so that multitasking environment for the systems are required to use the devices efficiently. In this paper, we develop the OS functions to support executing user programs which use FPGAs as customized hardware in multitasking environment. The target system consists of a host compute and FPGAs. The functions are implemented on the target system as RCOS server. RC-OS server supports management of FPGA resources and communication control between host computer and FPGA resources. We develop the programs which use the RC-OS functions, and executed them in multitasking environment on our prototype RC system. As the result, it shows that RC-OS server improves the usability of target system.