Sebastian Reimers: Management of HW-accelerators in L4Re (Forschungspro­jekt Anwendung)

31.08.2020, 11:00 am

Invitation to the presentation of Sebastian Reimers

Topic: Management of HW-accelerators in L4Re

Project: Forschungsprojekt Anwendung

Supervisors: Cornelia Wulf, Michael Willig

Abstract: Today, hardware acceleration is common practice to meet the ever increasing performance demands modern compute systems encounter. Operating systems for reconfigurable computing provide access to hardware accelerators via a common and abstracted interface. L4Re is an open-source microkernel and hypervisor, which was developed at the TU Dresden. As it is based on the L4-microkernel, L4Re uses capabilities for access control. In this research project, a driver for L4Re was implemented that manages hardware accelerators. Following the design philosophy of microkernels, drivers are implemented as userland applications and are not part of the kernel. The implemented driver enables the exchange of data between the processor and hardware accelerators guaranteeing exclusive access to hardware accelerators in a multi-threading system. The test of the complete system was done in a hardware-software co-design transferring data via AXI4-Lite as well as via AXI4-Stream.