Snap-On User-Space Manager for Dynamically Reconfigurable System-on-Chips

Due to increased embedded processing requirements, modern SoCs are becoming heterogeneous computing platforms by combining traditional processing units with custom reconfigurable hardware accelerators (HAs) on an FPGA fabric. However, efficiently managing such HAs in an embedded Linux environment involves handling Linux kernel source code and creating custom device drivers specific to a target platform, therefore negatively impacting development costs, portability and time-to-market. To address this issue, we present LEOSoC, a snap-on user-space manager for dynamically reconfigurable SoCs. Using LEOSoC does not require any specific version of the Linux kernel, nor to rebuild a custom driver for each new kernel release.LEOSoC consists of a base hardware system and a software layer which run on SoCs from various vendors. The system identifies the SoC on which it is running and auto-adapts its communication channels to the HAs accordingly. Furthermore, LEOSoC allows applications to partially or completely change the structure of the HAs at runtime without rebooting the system by leveraging the underlying SoC support for dynamic full/partial FPGA reconfiguration. The system has been tested on multiple commercial off the shelf (COTS) boards from different vendors, each one running different versions of Linux, therefore proving the real portability and usability of LEOSoC in a custom industrial design. Finally, we use a cloud detection algorithm for multispectral image processing as a showcase for LEOSoC's capabilities and performance.

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Paolo Ienne, Andrea Guerrieri, Sahand Kashani-Akhavan
2019
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Abstract

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/270088?ln=en

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Related concepts (5)

System

A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is expressed in its functioning. Systems are the subjects of study of systems theory and other systems sciences. Systems have several common properties and characteristics, including structure, function(s), behavior and interconnectivity.

Reconfigurable computing

Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to make substantial changes to the datapath itself in addition to the control flow. On the other hand, the main difference from custom hardware, i.e.

Linux

Linux (ˈlɪnʊks ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.