Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are becoming more and more common in high speed computing while the number of available logic blocks increases steadily. Modern FPGAs can be used for multiple purposes at a time and using them for only one task a time seems more and more as waste of potential computing power.

There are however obstacles in the way using the fpga as a more natural computing resource:

• Mapping of process to and from fpga's is not possible due a missing mapping between processes on a cpu and a fpga.
• The resources of the fpga can currently not be maintained in satisfing manner
• There is no common interface definition for processes mapped to an fpga

These obstacles are the reason for the rearch project which is currently in the state of creating an sample application to pinpoint the problems in an apropiate manner.

The research project is aiming to extend the Linux kernel with functionality needed for FPGA operation. The Linux kernel is used because its source freely available and it is in active development.