With an aim to build an OS for future multi- and many-core systems, the folks at Microsoft Research (Cambridge) have collaborated with researchers at ETH Zurich (a technology university) on a project code-named Barrelfish. When it comes to dealing with heavy traffic between multiple cores, Barrelfish helps to minimize all shared state up till level when the cores only exchange explicit messages, avoiding to use any shared memory. Another feature which stands out is that it uses a database-like approach to keep track of the hardware available, instead of fully isolating program from device via driver
Released earlier this month, Barrelfish is one of Microsoft’s next generation operating system projects, and the researchers behind it developed the operating system with several crucial factors in mind – the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
The first release snapshot was released on September 14 this year.