Systems Groups at ETH Zurich with the help of Microsoft has announced the release of Barrelfish, a new OS for future multi and many-core systems. The project is under MIT license to enable more researchers to work on it. The project is motivated by the; growing number of cores and requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

Barrelfish uses multikernel OS model which 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, processors as a single, unified platform.


The latest release of Barrelfish can now be obtained by anonymous Mercurial access.