Operating system support for online partial dynamic reconfiguration management

One of the main characteristics of reconfigurable embedded systems is their ability to be dynamically modified to be adapted at run-time to the current environment. This feature, that makes it possible to change the functionality of a system while it is up and running, requires a software application that is able to handle the reconfiguration process. The software for the management of reconfiguration can be developed either as a standalone application, that has to be specifically designed for each given system, or within an operating system, in order to fully exploit both code reuse and code portability. This paper proposes a novel methodology for the design of dynamically reconfigurable systems in which the reconfiguration management is completely assigned to an operating system reconfiguration support. Finally, a prototype implementation is presented, where a standard Linux operating system has been extended with the proposed operating system support in order to handle dynamically reconfigurable hardware resources.