Operating system support for dynamically reconfigurable SoC architectures

The advantages and the flexibility introduced into the hardware implementation by partial dynamic reconfiguration have rapidly changed the design flow of embedded systems. Although nowadays it is common to deal with systems characterized by a dynamic architecture able to manage and to adapt themselves to extremely different working scenarios, it is not so easy to provide such flexibility also into the software part of these systems. In order to cope with this problem we developed an innovative modular Linux driver that greatly simplifies the software handling of reconfiguration, allowing the programmer to concentrate on a hierarchical view of the system to be implemented. This methodology can be applied to different architectures providing a powerful and flexible software solution and, at the same time, it can be easily customized to respond to specific behaviors and requirements