Towards automatic management of reconfigurable accelerators

With growing interest in reconfigurable computing (RC) systems and constantly increasing complexity of reconfigurable devices the need for efficient ways of managing resources in these systems becomes apparent. This work presents an analysis of features inherent to RC systems and presents set of software primitives required for supporting reconfigurable accelerators on operating system (OS) level. Changes to Linux OS kernel architecture are proposed and described. Building on reported research the paper introduces a new module monitoring run-time metrics of executing hardware and software tasks. It is expected that as a result scheduling quality in reconfigurable systems will improve.