Lars Nolte, M.Sc.

Tracing events with hardware components is one powerful tool to monitor, debug, and improve existing designs. Through this approach, detailed insights can be acquired, and peak performance can be achieved, while being a challenging task to be integrated with good performance. One of the major challenges of tracing is to collect as much information as possible with ideally no impact on the to-be-analyzed system. Herewith, it can be ensured that the gained insights are representative of an execution without any tracing enabled. In this work, a hardware tracing component should be leveraged to reduce the intrusiveness of existing software tracing mechanisms in the Linux kernel. 

This should be integrated and tested on a hardware platform based on a Xilinx Zynq board. This features a heterogeneous ARM multicore setup directly integrated into the ASIC, combined with programmable logic in the FPGA part of the chip. In the FPGA a hardware accelerator is already implemented that should be traced with the new component.

To successfully complete this work, you should have:

• experience with microcontroller programming,
• basic knowledge about Git,
• first experience with the Linux environment.

The student is expected to be highly motivated and independent.

In this thesis, you lead the design and development of a web application to control a hardware demonstration platform and visualize the load of the available hardware resources, such as CPUs and hardware units. The used hardware platform is a Xilinx Zynq board. This features a heterogeneous ARM multicore setup directly integrated into the ASIC, combined with programmable logic in the FPGA part of the chip. In the FPGA, a hardware assist is implemented that improves blocking mechanisms in Linux by assisting the kernel with managing waiting threads. For further insights, the FPGA is also equipped with a 10G ethernet connection to send live data to a different PC for analysis and status information.

Responsibilities:

• Understand the hardware demonstration platform's functionality and requirements for visualization and control.
• Utilize your expertise in web development to design and create an interactive web application that visually represents hardware resource utilization (e.g., CPUs, hardware units) through graphs, charts, or other intuitive visualizations.
• Develop a user-friendly control interface within the web application allowing users to start, manage, and monitor software applications running on the demonstration platform.
• Conduct comprehensive testing, debugging, and optimization of the web application to ensure seamless functionality and performance.
• Engage in regular meetings, providing updates on the project's progress, and actively participate in software design and implementation discussions.

• Experience with data visualization libraries or similar tools to create dynamic and informative visual representations.
• First experience in web development projects, coursework, or internships showcasing relevant skills and expertise.
• Understanding of hardware resource monitoring and visualization concepts and the ability to translate these into effective user interfaces.
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a team environment.
• Knowledge of system administration or hardware-related concepts to facilitate seamless integration between the web application and the demonstration platform.

Tracing of events in hardware components is one powerful tool to monitor, debug and improve existing designs. Through this approach detailed insights can be acquired and peak performance can be achieved, while being a challenging task to be integrated with good performance. One of the major challenges of tracing is to collect as much information as possible with ideally no impact on the to-be-analyzed system. Herewith, it can be ensured that the gained insights are representative of an execution without any tracing enabled. In this work, a hardware tracing component should be designed that takes an arbitrary data input and sends it via an ethernet connection to a different PC that performs the postprocessing of the data. The tracing component has to be designed in a way that for sending the data over ethernet no CPU involvement is required to minimize the impact on the traced system. This tracing component should be integrated into the hardware platform based on a Xilinx Zynq board. This features a heterogeneous ARM multicore setup directly integrated into the ASIC, combined with programmable logic in the FPGA part of the chip. In the FPGA a hardware accelerator is already implemented that should be traced with the new component.

To successfully complete this work, you should have:

• good HDL programming skills,
• experience with microcontroller programming,
• basic knowledge about Git,
• first experience with the Linux environment.

The student is expected to be highly motivated and independent.

With the ever-increasing network speeds of physical links, the processing of packets on network nodes is becoming more and more of a bottleneck. Packet processing on a standard Linux-based network node traditionally involves the operating system (OS). Since an OS is usually optimized for a range of tasks rather than a specific task, using conventional Linux kernel functionalities for packet processing can degrade performance. For this reason, approaches to bypass the kernel have been proposed to perform network processing in user space.

One approach of bypassing the kernel that has attracted growing interest in recent years is Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). By processing packets entirely in user space, DPDK avoids time-consuming context switches between user space and kernel space. This comes at the cost of one CPU core actively polling for new packets, instead of the network interface card (NIC) triggering interrupts for incoming packets. In addition, DPDK itself mainly provides the poll mode drivers for selected NICs, but the processing of the packets is the duty of the application using DPDK. Thus, while DPDK is suitable for certain application scenarios, there are also numerous use cases that are better suited to be implemented using the Linux networking stack. For example, to establish a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection, an additional user space TCP/IP stack must be implemented or taken from open-source projects. These are generally not as feature-rich as the conventional Linux networking stack and do not necessarily improve performance.

This work aims to find a method to compare applications using DPDK with applications using the Linux network stack. Envisioned is a client-server application that uses iperf3 to generate data traffic.

To successfully complete this work, you should have:

• very good programming skills in Python and C/C++,
• basic knowledge about Git,
• first experience with the Linux environment.

The student is expected to be highly motivated and independent.