Barrelfish
Encyclopedia
Barrelfish is an experimental computer operating system
built by ETH Zurich
with the assistance of Microsoft Research
in Cambridge
. It is an experimental operating system designed from the ground up for scalability for computers built with multi-core processors
with the goal of reducing the compounding decrease in benefit as more CPUs are used in a computer via putting low level hardware information in a database
, removing the necessity for driver software
.
The partners released the first snapshot of the OS on September 15, 2009 with a second being released in March, 2011. Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD
-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the 3-clause BSD-style license
.
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
built by ETH Zurich
ETH Zurich
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich or ETH Zürich is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university in the City of Zurich, Switzerland....
with the assistance of Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
. It is an experimental operating system designed from the ground up for scalability for computers built with multi-core processors
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
with the goal of reducing the compounding decrease in benefit as more CPUs are used in a computer via putting low level hardware information in a database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
, removing the necessity for driver software
Device driver
In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device....
.
The partners released the first snapshot of the OS on September 15, 2009 with a second being released in March, 2011. Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the 3-clause BSD-style license
BSD licenses
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which it is named....
.
See also
- SingularitySingularity (operating system)Singularity is an experimental operating system being built by Microsoft Research since 2003. It is intended as a highly-dependable OS in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code.- Workings :...
- MidoriMidori (operating system)Midori is the code name for a managed code operating system being developed by Microsoft Research. It has been reported to be a possible commercial implementation of the Singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the...
Further reading
- Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs, Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Adrian Schüpbach, and Akhilesh Singhania. The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on OS Principles, Big Sky, MT, USA, October 2009.
- Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Andrew Baumann, and Timothy Roscoe. Filet-o-Fish: practical and dependable domain-specific languages for OS development. In 5th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), Big Sky, MT, USA, October 2009.
- Andrew Baumann, Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Akhilesh Singhania, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, and Rebecca Isaacs. Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Monte Verità, Switzerland, May 2009.
- Adrian Schüpbach, Simon Peter, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, Tim Harris, and Rebecca Isaacs. Embracing diversity in the Barrelfish manycore operating system. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems, Boston, MA, USA, June 2008.