A distributed object system approach for dynamic reconfiguration

Managing reconfigurable hardware resources at runtime is expected to be a new task for future operating systems. But due to the mixture of parallel and sequential parts of dynamically reconfigurable applications, it is not entirely clear so far, how to use and to program such systems. A new interpretation of dynamically reconfigurable applications is presented. It is shown, that the parallel computing concept of distributed object systems may be adapted for dynamically reconfigurable architectures. This approach answers many open questions concerning communication, interruption, and relocation of reconfigurable modules. It is explored by means of an extended Linux operating system in conjunction with a SystemC model of a dynamically reconfigurable FPGA.