Running the Non-Windows Barrelfish OS on the Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer

Barrelfish OS, a Microsoft Research non-Windows prototype operating system has been tweaked to run on the Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC).

Softpedia readers that want to know more about what it took to get the platform to play nice with Intel SCC, as well as the actual experience of running the Barrelfish research multikernel OS, can download this whitepaper from Barrelfish.org. (via Sam Stokes)

Barrelfish OS is just one of the platform projects being prototyped by Microsoft Research. And in this regard, I must emphasize that Barrelfish OS is nothing more than an experiment, and that there’s no guarantee of a commercial product resulting from this work.

“Traditional OS architectures based on a single, shared-memory kernel face significant challenges from hardware trends, in particular the increasing cost of system-wide cachecoherence as core counts increase, and the emergence of heterogeneous architectures – both on a single die, and also between CPUs, co-processors like GPUs, and programmable peripherals within a platform,” reads an excerpt of the whitepaper.

“The multikernel is an alternative OS model that employs message passing instead of data sharing and enables architecture agnostic inter-core communication, including across non-coherent shared memory and PCIe peripheral buses. This allows a single OS instance to manage the complete collection of heterogeneous, non-cache-coherent processors as a single, unified platform.”

The researchers that authored the whitepaper not only managed to get Barrelfish OS running on the SCC, but also on an SCC + host PC heterogeneous machine.

Barrelfish OS is available for download to researchers for testing purposes only. This is not a full-featured operating system, nor even close to a platform that could run into production, so end users better leave it alone.

“We have demonstrated that it is possible to run a single image OS across a heterogeneous, non-cache-coherent machine consisting of an SCC and its host PC with reasonable performance (the remaining issues with our PCIe interconnect driver notwithstanding),” reads a fragment of the research whitepaper’s conclusion.