Download New Release of non-Windows Barrelfish OS from Microsoft

A new release of the Barrelfish operating system is now available for download to early adopters.

The Barrelfish platform is a prototype developed by ETH Zurich in collaboration with Microsoft Research. It’s important to underline that Barrelfish cannot be considered anything else but an experiment, at least for the time being.

Researchers interested in playing around with Barrelfish can download it via Mercurial. “The latest version of Barrelfish is now available. We've also moved over to anonymous access using Mercurial, so we'll do a new release whenever the regression tests all pass,” reads an announcement on the platform’s official website.

According to the official description of this research operating system, the project is designed to explore the structure of a platform tailored to future multi- and many-core systems.

“We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, 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,” a member of the project revealed.

Being just a research OS, Barrelfish is of course offered for download free of charge, being available under the MIT Open Source license.

When building Barrelfish, the researchers contributing to the project have started from scratch, as such, this OS is fundamentally different from existing platforms such as Windows or Linux.

“We anticipate the main challenges for operating systems will be scalability as the number of cores increases, and in dealing with processor and system heterogeneity. We have proposed a radically different way of structuring an operating system to address these challenges,” the researchers behind the project note.

“Barrelfish is an implementation of our proposal, for "proof of concept", and for giving us a concrete foundation with which to extend our research in this area – for example we are also looking at an asynchronous programming model, a parallel file system etc.”