Runtime Filesystem Support for Reconfigurable FPGA Hardware Processes in BORPH

This paper presents the design of BORPH's file system layer for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. BORPH provides user FPGA designs that execute as hardware processes access to the general file system using familiar UNIX file I/O semantics. Such capability provides FPGA designers an intuitive interface not only for regular file I/O, but also for representing streaming hardware/software and hardware/hardware communication using UNIX pipes. Design trade-offs among system manageability, user usability and application performance are explored. A case of mixed hardware/software video processing is presented as a proof-of-concept.