Hardware Assist for Linux IPC on an FPGA Platform
Lars Nolte, Tim Twardzik, Camille Jalier, Jiyuan Shi, Thomas Wild, Andreas Herkersdorf · 2024
Specialized hardware units often accelerate compute-intensive or memory-heavy functions. In previous publications, we proposed concepts to assist Linux with a hardware unit for managing waiting threads to improve blocking inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. This paper assesses the effectiveness of this hardware support on a Zynq platform. Although main memory accesses by our hardware unit are time-consuming, a consumer-producer application achieved an up to 220% increased message rate.