Editing Reconfigurable computing (section)

== Challenges for operating systems ==
One of the key challenges for reconfigurable computing is to enable higher design productivity and provide an easier way to use reconfigurable computing systems for users that are unfamiliar with the underlying concepts. One way of doing this is to provide standardization and abstraction, usually supported and enforced by an operating system.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal|last1=Eckert|first1=Marcel|last2=Meyer|first2=Dominik|last3=Haase|first3=Jan|last4=Klauer|first4=Bernd|date=2016-11-30|title=Operating System Concepts for Reconfigurable Computing: Review and Survey|journal=International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing|language=en|volume=2016|pages=1–11|doi=10.1155/2016/2478907|issn=1687-7195|doi-access=free}} [[File:CC-BY icon.svg|50px]] This article contains quotations from this source, which is available under the [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)] license.</ref>

One of the major tasks of an operating system is to hide the hardware and present programs (and their programmers) with nice, clean, elegant, and consistent abstractions to work with instead. In other words, the two main tasks of an operating system are abstraction and [[Resource management (computing)|resource management]].<ref name=":0" />

Abstraction is a powerful mechanism to handle complex and different (hardware) tasks in a well-defined and common manner. One of the most elementary OS abstractions is a process. A process is a running application that has the perception (provided by the OS) that it is running on its own on the underlying virtual hardware. This can be relaxed by the concept of threads, allowing different tasks to run concurrently on this virtual hardware to exploit task level parallelism. To allow different processes and threads to coordinate their work, communication and synchronization methods have to be provided by the OS.<ref name=":0" />

In addition to abstraction, resource management of the underlying hardware components is necessary because the virtual computers provided to the processes and threads by the operating system need to share available physical resources (processors, memory, and devices) spatially and temporarily.<ref name=":0" />