ReconOS64: A Hardware Operating System for Modern Platform FPGAs with 64-Bit Support

Abstract

Reconfigurable hardware operating systems provide software-like abstractions for hardware accelerators. In particu-lar abstractions that view hardware accelerators as threads and integrate them into a multi-threaded environment have received popularity. However, such abstractions are not yet available for latest platform FPGAs. In this paper, we present ReconOS64, a reconfigurable hard-ware operating system for 64-Bit modern platform FPGAs. We discuss the architecture and the build flow and report on a number of experiments that evaluate the performance of the system. In particular, we compare the performance to a previous, 32- Bit ReconOS system. The evaluation shows that the step towards 64- Bit is not only necessary to make hardware operating system support available for modern platform FPGAs, but also improves the performance of operating system calls and memory accesses for hardware threads.