Here is a better description of Borph: http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Bee2OperatingSystem.html http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Bee2OperatingSystem.html

Here is a better description of Borph: http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Bee2OperatingSystem.html http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Bee2OperatingSystem.html Here is also a much clearer explanation taken from that link: BORPH is an extended Linux kernel that treats FPGA resources as native computational resources on reconfigurable computers such as BEE2. As such, it is more than just a way to configure an FPGA. It also provides integral operating system supports for FPGA designs, such as the ability for an FPGA design to read/write to the standard Linux file system. If it supports partial-reconfiguration (which it looks like it does), then it could be a very handy tool. Why? Hardware is significantly faster than software. While Linux is running, the ability to spawn hardware at will would be great for many applications. At UCSB, some of the research I did related to this very problem. What I was trying to do was have a Linux web server running on an FPGA that could dynamically reconfigure itself for different experiments. I ended up choosing a board that has an FPGA that communicates with a ARM processor. Decent size FPGAs were (and still are) expensive. For all the Linux overhead and my budget, a hybrid FPGA-processor platform turned out to be the better solution. If anyone is interested, here is the problem we were solving: http://ece.ucsb.edu/academics/undergrad/capstone/presentations/flexSD-poster.pdf http://ece.ucsb.edu/academics/undergrad/capstone/presentatio...