Connectal provides a hardware-software interface for applications split between user mode code and custom hardware in an FPGA. Portal can automatically build the software and hardware glue for a message based interface and also provides for configuring and using shared memory between applications and hardware. Communications between hardware and software are provided by a bidirectional flow of events and regions of memory shared between hardware and software. Events from software to hardware are called requests and events from hardware to software are called indications, but in fact they are symmetric.
A logical request/indication pair is referred to as a portal". An
application can make use of multiple portals, which may be specified
independently. A portal is specified by a BSV interface declaration,
from which connectalgen generates BSV and C++ wrappers and
proxies.
Connectal has a mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/connectal
The Connectal repo has moved to https://github.com/cambridgehackers/connectal
The old xbsv code is available on the "archive" branch of this repository.