Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] FPGAs and how to program them from kernel

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Thursday 23 July 2015 12:57:11 Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> (Please cc me on replies)
> 
> FPGAs are common in embedded systems, where they can provide missing
> hardware interfaces, directly implement functionality, or provide
> custom hardware modules. These days they become available for servers,
> too, where they can act as high-performance co-processors (which are
> tricky to program).
> 
> There are very different requirements for FPGA that implements your
> SATA controller (so you need it for boot), and one where multiple
> userland applications directly access FPGA using it for different
> computations, needing FPGA netlist to be changed based on userspace
> needs. Yet, it would be nice to come up with single interface that can
> handle all the different applications, and is suitable for mainline
> kernel.
> 
> People that might be interested:
> 
> Michal Simek <michal.simek@xilinx.com>
> Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen@opensource.altera.com>
> <atull@opensource.altera.com>
> Steffen Trumtrar <s.trumtrar@pengutronix.de>
> Marek Vasut <marex@denx.de>
> Alan Cox

I've been working on V4L2 drivers for Xilinx FPGAs and I'm interested in this 
topic from that point of view. I see interactions with userspace being one of 
the most complex part, both in terms of triggering the reprogramming 
operations and handling applications that actively use the FPGA resources.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart