  Recently, FPGA accelerators have risen in popularity as they present a
suitable way of satisfying the high-computation and low-power demands of real
time applications. The modern electric transportation systems (such as
aircraft, road vehicles) can greatly profit from embedded FPGAs, which
incorporate both high-performance and flexibility features into a single SoC.
At the same time, the virtualization of FPGA resources aims to reinforce these
systems with strong isolation, consolidation and security. In this paper, we
present a novel virtualization framework aimed for SoC-attached FPGA devices,
in a Linux and QEMU/KVM setup. We use Virtio as a means to enable the
configuration of FPGA resources from guest systems in an efficient way. Also,
we employ the Linux VFIO and Device Tree Overlays technologies in order to
render the FPGA resources dynamically accessible to guest systems. The ability
to dynamically configure and utilize the FPGA resources from a virtualization
environment is described in details. The evaluation procedure of the solution
is presented and the virtualization overhead is benchmarked as minimal (around
10%) when accessing the FPGA devices from guest systems.
