Hardware-level Access Control and Scheduling of Shared Hardware Accelerators

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

With the trend to consolidate hardware on a single platform, FPGA virtualization plays an increasingly important role in the embedded domain. FPGA virtualization allows multiple software tasks or even guest operating systems to share reconfigurable resources. However, state-of-the-art approaches assign each hardware accelerator to a single software task for a fixed duration. This becomes a problem when the number of hardware accelerators required by software tasks concurrently exceeds the FPGA area. If several software tasks request to accelerate the same functionality, accelerators can be shared. Embedded reconfigurable systems face the challenge of a uniform address space. When several tasks use a memory-mapped communication interface that allows to directly access the accelerator’s address space, access control and the protection from unauthorized access must be ensured. Existing software-based approaches lead to high latencies. Thus, we propose a hardware-level scheduler that schedules hardware tasks in spatial and temporal respect. The allocation to a hardware accelerator is combined with the assignment of access rights. Any unauthorized access leads to
a page fault. When hardware tasks share an accelerator, they are scheduled according to the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) policy. Buffers ensure data isolation. Compared to hardware task scheduling in software, a performance increase of 7.02 times is reached.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2024 27th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD). IEEE
Pages274 - 281
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-2571-8441/work/163294440
ORCID /0000-0002-6311-3251/work/163294940

Keywords