Eckert, Marcel

Nowadays, FPGAs are commonly used to take advantage of their reconfigurability as accelerator units. Moores Law still predicts increasing transistor densities for integrated circuits. Some Authors predict, that this will result in the general usage of reconfigurable areas in future computer architectures. This thesis proposes to combine those reconfigurable areas with the idea of system virtual machines. The capability of reconfigurable hardware to provide software as needed is exploited to support system virtual machines with their own hardware on demand. Firstly, the architectural requirements to take advantage of reconfigurable areas for the purpose of supporting virtual machines are discussed theoretically for the important parts of a computer: main memory, devices and processors. As a second step, a proof of concept demonstrator is developed to proof the theoretically discussed advantages of such a FPGA supported virtualization system. The ability to perform dynamic and partial reconfiguration of a FPGA is used to implement both, the static (for the host system) and the reconfigurable parts (for the guest systems) of the hardware of such a virtualization system. The demonstrator not only includes hardware, but also an full fledged operating system (an adapted Linux kernel, able to be executed on the hardware) including all necessary device drivers. Finally, the theoretically expected advantages of a FPGA based virtualization system over conventional virtualization systems are measured and therefore shown on base of the proof of concept demonstrator. Furthermore remaining problems and possible solutions will be presented.