Generic virtual filesystems for reconfigurable devices

Recent Xilinx field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) enables embedded systems to adapt their hardware functionalities at run-time using dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR). This paper presents a generic file system to support standard operating systems (OS) for efficient FPGA resources management and implementation of intellectual property (IP) cores using DPR technology. The proposed generic file system for FPGAs (FPGAFS) provides a generic and flexible solution to abstract the hardware resources such as DPR regions. FPGAFS concept is described and has been validated through the implementation of image processing IP cores. Evaluation of framework performance is also carried out to identify different trad-offs and bottlenecks.