Future space missions will demand unprecedented levels of on-board computing, beyond traditional roles such as avionics and spacecraft management. Applications such as virtual presence and telerobotics, and real time data analysis and reduction, will

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Reconfigurable Linux for Spaceflight Applications
John Williams and Neil Bergmann, School of
ITEE The University of Queensland, Australia
Reconfigurable Linux refers to the use of
embedded Linux on reconfigurable computing
platforms utilising either hard or soft processor
cores, with customisations that integrate the
logic fabric into the operating system. We have
previously ported the Linux kernel to the Xilinx
Microblaze soft processor core, providing
source-level portability with desktop Linux
systems, on a reconfigurable computer. Existing
scientific codes can be compiled and run on this
platform with little or no modification.
Future space missions will demand unprecedented
levels of on-board computing, beyond traditional
roles such as avionics and spacecraft management.
Applications such as virtual presence and
telerobotics, and real time data analysis and
reduction, will call for more general purpose
computing resources. They will also require
orders of magnitude performance increases over
present-day space computing systems.
Reconfigurable computing has been often
identified as an enabling technology for such
next-generation spaceflight computing systems.
High performance, fault-tolerance, design
flexibility and reuse, and post-deployment
functional re-targeting are characteristics that
support this view. However much of this
potential remains untapped.
Our ongoing research focuses on extending
Reconfigurable Linux to meet the requirements
outlined above. Previous experimental work has
demonstrated self-reconfiguring Linux systems,
with the logic fabric mapped as an operating
system resource. Other work includes integration
of a hardware process model into the Linux
kernel.
A reconfigurable operating system forms a
contract between the system hardware and the
application developer. Previous spaceflight
applications of reconfigurable logic typically
are very tightly coupled to surrounding systems
and circuitry. A general purpose platform
requires a broader, more flexible development and
deployment environment.
Widespread acceptance of reconfigurable computing
for space applications requires a flexible, broad
based operating system. Linux is a natural
platform upon which to build the next generation
of advanced spaceflight computing systems.