Learn, hack!

URL

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/files/289-the-kernel-accelerator-device-paper.pdf

File name

289-the-kernel-accelerator-device-paper.pdf

File size

229.4 KB

MD5

789b6fa100573341f4c72788d245c1f6

SHA1

3737c5c44dcc36fdb8173465d4d440b06a3e3b6c

KAD is an interdisciplinary development project which consists of kernel driver programming, fpga programming (VHDL/Verilog) and hardware development. There is no working KAD at the moment, but our aim is to develop such a device under the GPL with much support from everyone who likes to do so. The development will be carried out from bottom up by integrating existing components into the kad. KAD is a Kernel Accelerator Device which brings reconfigurable computing to the Linux Kernel. (And hopefully for other kernels if we find people who code support for other Platforms like *BSD) The KAD is a hardware based accelerator card which accelerates computers by executing recurring time consuming tasks in hardware. The KAD-hardware is a pci-slot card with at least one reconfigurable FPGA (field programmable gate array) on it. An additional fpga is used as pci-bridge which is needed to handle the communication and the fpga reconfiguration tasks. Depending on the task which is to be accelerated, the kernel-module to be used will load the appropriate open-source fpga-firmware into the device (configuration). For example if one wants to accelerate aes drive encryption she simply loads the kad_aes kernel module which does the computation intensive parts in the KAD. So the CPU has more time for other things. KAD is an interdisciplinary development project which consists of kernel driver programming, fpga programming (VHDL/Verilog) and hardware development. There is no working KAD at the moment, but our aim is to develop such a device under the GPL with much support from everyone who likes to do so. The development will be carried out from bottom up by integrating existing components into the kad. The first part of the Lecture will present the Architecture and the Techlologies behind the KAD. The second part will discuss the concept and possible alternatives and variants.