On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 09:01:34PM +0000, One Thousand Gnomes wrote: > There are plenty of people today who treat the FPGA as an entirely > dynamic resource. It's not like flashing a controller, its near > immediate. But this is a completely different use case. Remember, there are *megabytes* of internal state in a FPGA, and it isn't really feasible to dump/restore that state. It is one thing to context switch a maths algorithm that is built to be stateless, it is quite another to context switch between, say an ethernet core with an operating Linux Net driver doing DMA and a maths algorithm. A DT overlay approach where the overlay has to be unloaded to 'free' the FPGA makes alot of sense to me for the stateful kernel driver environment, and open/close/etc makes alot of sense for the stateless switchable userspace environment - other than sharing configuration code, is there any overlap between these use cases???? > Its completely dynamic and it will get more so as we switch from the > painful world of VHDL and friends to high level parallel aware language > compilers for FPGAs and everyone will be knocking up quick FPGA hacks. Only for some users. In my world FPGAs are filled with bus interface logic, ethernet controllers, memory controllers, packet processing engines, etc. This is all incredibly stateful - both in the FPGA itself, and in the Linux side w/ drviers. It certainly will not ever work in the model you are talking about. Even if the digital state could somehow be frozen, dumped and restored, all the FPGA external interface logic has *ANALOG* state that cannot ever be dump/restored. It just isn't feasible for that class of application. Jason _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
