Abstract

This talk is part of FreeBSD Developer Summit http://wiki.freebsd.org/200909DevSummit.

Stanford NetFPGA is a programmable network interface card, widely used in various communication education and research projects where there is a need to have readily available reprogrammable hardware for students or where there is a need for comparative results. The Stanford distribution set includes the card, a few reference implementations in Verilog source code, and drivers for Linux. However, having support only for Linux can be seen as a slight deficiency, as a large part of contemporary communications research takes place on the various BSD platforms.

In this talk, we present the design and implementation for experimental FreeBSD drivers for the Stanford NetFPGA card. We discuss the driver design, briefly the lessons learned in the development process, and implementation details. We highlight a few problems related to bringing support for reprogrammable hardware into the FreeBSD kernel subsystems. We also present early performance results and our plans for potential future work.

Author bio ========== Wojciech Adam Koszek is a 4th year computer engineering student at Technical University of Czestochowa, Poland. He started his FreeBSD activity four years ago. He’s interested in OS kernel programming, hardware/software interface layers, and digital logic design. The presented work was mainly completed while his internship at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Ericsson Research Nomadic Lab, in Helsinki, Finland.