The Barrelfish Operating System

Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch and released by ETH Zurich in Switzerland, with assistance from Microsoft Research. We are exploring how to structure an OS for 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.

For more information, please read our research papers below and see the FAQ.

News: 8th July 2011

• Technical notes: We've put a snapshot of the technical notes below, so you don't have to build the source to obtain them. They are not guaranteed to be up to date, though, so check the source code for the latest versions.
• New release! The latest version of Barrelfish is now available. We've also moved to over to anonymous access using Mercurial, so we'll do a new release whenever the regression tests all pass.
• We're hiring! ETH is currently hiring postdocs and PhD students to work on Barrelfish. For more information, see here.

Barrelfish is released under the MIT Open Source license.

The latest release of Barrelfish can now be obtained by anonymous Mercurial access from http://hg.barrelfish.org/.

1. Overview
2. Glossary
3. Mackerel
4. Hake
5. Virtual Memory
6. The Single Chip Cloud Computer
7. Routing
8. The Beehive Processor
9. Tracing Framework
10. Notifications
11. Specification
12. Inter-Dispatcher Communication
13. Services
14. Capability Management

We have setup a mailing list where you can ask for help or help others working with Barrelfish. You will need to subscribe before posting to the list.

For more research-oriented descriptions of Barrelfish, see our publications.

Finally, there is also a public Wiki server for Barrelfish information - please apply for an account if you want to contribute.

From the ETH Zurich Systems Group:

• Zachary Anderson
• Stefan Kästle
• Simon Peter
• Timothy Roscoe
• Adrian Schüpbach
• Pravin Shinde
• Akhilesh Singhania

From Microsoft Research, Redmond:

• Andrew Baumann

From Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley:

• Paul Barham
• Rebecca Isaacs
• Vijayan Prabhakaran

From Microsoft Research, Cambridge:

• Richard Black
• Tim Harris
• Orion Hodson
• Ross McIlroy

Past interns, students, alumni, and other contributors:

• Pierre-Evariste Dagand
• Ankush Gupta
• Dominik Menzi
• Amar Phanishayee
• Kaveh Razavi
• Jan Rellermeyer
• Raffaele Sandrini
• Bram Scheidegger
• Dario Simone
• Animesh Trivedi

Friends and collaborators:

• Gustavo Alonso
• Tom Anderson
• Matthias Gries
• Ihor Kuz

• Tim Harris, Martín Abadi, Rebecca Isaacs, Ross McIlroy. AC: Composable Asynchronous IO for Native Languages. In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2011), Portland, OR, USA, October 2011. [ .pdf ]
• Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Dominik Menzi, Timothy Roscoe. Early experience with the Barrelfish OS and the Single-Chip Cloud Computer. In Proceedings of the 3rd Intel Multicore Applications Research Community Symposium (MARC), Ettlingen, Germany, July 2011. [ .pdf ]
• Ihor Kuz, Zachary Anderson, Pravin Shinde, Timothy Roscoe. Multicore OS benchmarks: we can do better. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-XIII), Napa, CA, USA, May 2011. [ .pdf ]
• Jeff Mogul, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Livio Soares. Mind the Gap: Reconnecting Architecture and OS Research. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-XIII), Napa, CA, USA, May 2011. [ .pdf ]
• Adrian Schüpbach, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Simon Peter. A declarative language approach to device configuration. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Newport Beach, CA, USA, March 2011. [ .pdf ]
• Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Paul Barham, Andrew Baumann, Rebecca Isaacs, Tim Harris, and Timothy Roscoe. Design principles for end-to-end multicore schedulers. In 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism, Berkeley, CA, USA, June 2010. [ .pdf ]
• 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. [ .pdf ]
• 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. [ .pdf ]
• 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. [ .pdf ]
• 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. [ .pdf ]

Theses, reports, etc.

• Raffaele Sandrini. VMkit: A lightweight hypervisor library for Barrelfish. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, September 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Dario Simone. Power management in a manycore operating system. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, August 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Animesh Trivedi Hotplug in a multikernel operating system. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, August 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Pierre-Evariste Dagand. Language Support for Reliable Operating Systems. Master's thesis, ENS Cachan-Bretagne – University of Rennes, France, June 2009. [ .pdf ]

This web page was brought to you by a server running Barrelfish.