An Operating System Infrastructure for Fault-Tolerant Reconfigurable Networks

Dynamic hardware reconfiguration is becoming a key technology in embedded system design that offers among others new potentials in dependable computing. To make system designers benefit from this new technology, powerful infrastructures and programming environments are needed. In this paper, we will propose new concepts of an operating system (OS) infrastructure for reconfigurable networks that allow to efficiently design fault-tolerant systems. For this purpose, we consider a hardware/software solution that supports dynamic rerouting, hardware and software task migration, hardware/software task morphing, and online partitioning. Finally. we will present an implementation of such a reconfigurable network providing this OS infrastructure