An operating system framework for reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurable computing have been accepted as vehicles for both achieving potentially much higher performance than software and maintaining a higher level of flexibility than hardware. However, there is still no much operating system support for it. Based on the essential differences between software-tasks and hardware-tasks, this pa-per presents and implements a RTOS for reconfigurable systems using uniform multitask model, called SHUM-UCOS (software-tasks hardware-tasks uniform management UCOS) , which is designed with the UCOSII as prototype. This RTOS traces and manages the usage of re-configurable resources (FPGAs). and can improve the utilization of these resource and the parallelism of the tasks with the hardware-tasks preconfiguration. And it has been proved by experiments that SHUM-UCOS can shorten the migration time from software implements to hardware implements with the performance improvement.