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For the control system of the new FAIR accelerator facility a standard equipment controller, the Scalable Control Unit (SCU), is presently under development. First prototypes have already been tested in real applications. The controller combines an x86 ComExpress Board and an Altera Arria II FPGA. Over a parallel bus interface called the SCU bus, up to 12 slave boards can be controlled. Communication between CPU and FPGA is done by a PCIe link. We discuss the real time behaviour between the Linux OS and the FPGA Hardware. For the test, a Front-End Software Architecture (FESA) class, running under Linux, communicates with the PCIe bridge in the FPGA. Although we are using PCIe only for single 32 bit wide accesses to the FPGA address space, the performance still seems sufficient. The tests showed an average response time to IRQs of 50 microseconds with a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU. This includes the context change to the FESA userspace application and the reply back to the FPGA. Further topics are the bandwidth of the PCIe link for single/burst transfers and the performance of the SCU bus communication.
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