Cooperative multithreading in dynamically reconfigurable systems

Preemptive multitasking, a popular technique for timesharing of computational resources in software-based systems, faces considerable difficulties when applied to partially reconfigurable hardware. In this paper, we propose a cooperative scheduling technique for reconfigurable hardware threads as a feasible compromise between computational efficiency and implementation complexity. We have implemented this mechanism for the multithreaded reconfigurable operating system ReconOS and evaluated its overheads and performance on a prototype.