Linux on FPGA platforms: control software to connect custom peripherals.

Accessing custom hardware peripherals from a soft-CPU realized on FPGA fabric is a common task. We use a Virtex-5 FPGA with a MicroBlaze soft-CPU running a standard Linux kernel as the core of our embedded system. In order to enable processes on the Linux system to communicate with custom peripherals on the FPGA a device driver is implemented to take advantage of the fast simplex link (FSL) bus and the resulting performance regarding throughput and latency is measured.