Hardware task scheduling and placement in operating systems for dynamically reconfigurable SoC

Issue title: Selected papers of EUC 2005

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Hsiung, Pao-Ann | Huang, Chun-Hsian | Chen, Yuan-Hsiu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan–621

Note: [] Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 5 272 0411; Ext. 33119; Fax: +886 5 272 0859; E-mail: hpa@computer.org

Abstract: Existing operating systems can manage the execution of software tasks efficiently, however the manipulation of hardware tasks is very limited. In the research on the design and implementation of an embedded operating system that manages both software and hardware tasks in the same framework, two major issues are the dynamic scheduling and the dynamic placement of hardware tasks into a reconfigurable logic space in an SoC. The distinguishing criteria for good dynamic scheduling and placement methods include the total schedule length and the amount of fragmentation incurred while tasks are dynamically placed and replaced. Existing methods either do not take fragmentation into consideration or postpone the consideration of fragmentation to a later stage of space allocation. In our method, we try to reduce fragmentation during placement itself. The advantage of such an approach is that not only the reconfigurable space is utilized more efficiently, but the total schedule length is also reduced, that is, hardware tasks complete faster. Experimental results on large random tasks sets have shown that the proposed improvement is as much as 23.3% in total fragmentation and 2.0% in total schedule time.

Keywords: Operating system for reconfigurable SoC, hardware scheduling, placement, dynamic partial reconfiguration

DOI: 10.3233/JEC-2009-0078

Journal: Journal of Embedded Computing, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 53-62, 2009