A portable abstraction layer for hardware threads

The multithreaded programming model has been shown to provide a suitable abstraction for reconfigurable computers. Previous implementations of corresponding runtime systems have been limited to a single host operating system, hardware platform, or application domain. This paper presents the implementation of ReconOS, our hardware/software multithreaded programming model, on both eCos and Linux-based host systems as well as on PowerPC and MicroBlaze CPUs. This demonstrates that ReconOS provides a truly portable abstraction layer for programming reconfigurable computers. Further, we quantify the performance of operating system calls and measure the resulting application level performance.