Deterministic Mechanism for Run-time Reconfiguration Activities in an RTOS

Reconfigurable computing based on hybrid architectures, comprising general purpose processor (CPU) and field programmable gate array (FPGA), is very attractive because it can provide high computational performance as well as flexibility to support the requirements of today's embedded systems. However, the relative high reconfiguration costs often are an obstacle when using such architectures for run-time reconfigurable systems. In order to still be able to benefit from the flexibility of such systems, the used real-time operating system must explicitly respect the reconfiguration time. In such systems, the reconfiguration activities need to be carried out during run-time without causing critical applications to miss their deadlines. In this paper, we show how we model these reconfiguration activities as aperiodic jobs. Therefore, we apply the server-based method from the real-time scheduling theory to the scheduling of aperiodic activities. Using these techniques, we can achieve a deterministic environment for reconfiguration activities as well as an improvement of their responsiveness.