Barrelfish (operating system)

Barrelfish
Developer	ETH Zurich with assistance of Microsoft Research
Working state	Discontinued
Source model	Open source
Initial release	September 15, 2009;15 years ago (2009-09-15)
Latest release	2020.03.23 / March 23, 2020;5 years ago (2020-03-23)
Repository	github.com/BarrelfishOS/barrelfish
Kernel type	Multikernel, Microkernel
License	MIT License
Official website	www.barrelfish.org

Barrelfish is a discontinued, open-source distributed operating system, which was developed by researchers at ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research. ^[1] The original motivation for the operating system was formed in 2006 ^[2] by Timothy Roscoe and Paul Barham, and was announced in September 2009. ^[3] The final official release was on March 23, 2020. ^[1]

The Barrelfish project's goal was to create a operating system that would account for an increasing amount of processor cores in modern computers, ^[4] and continuously gather statistics about the hardware so that it could make more accurate decisions when scheduling and transferring data. It was also planned that it would have compatibility with other operating systems such as the Linux and Microsoft Windows. The team behind Barrelfish intended take inspiration from previous research, including Nemesis, a project which Roscoe and Barham had previously worked on in the past. ^[2]

Name origin

The inspiration for the name comes for the name came from the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel", which represented the dynamic structure that the operating system was planned to have. ^[2] While originally being developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, it was also partly supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware before it was discontinued. ^[1]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Singularity
• Midori

References

1. "The Barrelfish Operating System".
2. Baumann, Andrew (2021-04-21). "Fish in a Barrel: an insider's retrospective of the SOSP'09 multikernel paper". ACM SIGOPS. Retrieved 2025-07-04.
3. Hughes, Alyssa (2011-07-07). "Barrelfish: Exploring a Multicore OS". Microsoft Research. Retrieved 2025-07-04.
4. "Microsoft unveils Barrelfish multi-core optimized OS". Engadget. 2009-09-29. Retrieved 2025-07-04.

Further reading

• Andrew Baumann; Paul Barham; Pierre-Evariste Dagand; Tim Harris; Rebecca Isaacs; Simon Peter; Timothy Roscoe; Adrian Schüpbach; Akhilesh Singhania (October 2009). The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems (PDF). 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Big Sky, MT, USA. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
• Pierre-Evariste Dagand; Andrew Baumann; Timothy Roscoe (October 2009). Filet-o-Fish: practical and dependable domain-specific languages for OS development (PDF). 5th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems. Big Sky, MT, USA. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
• Andrew Baumann; Simon Peter; Adrian Schüpbach; Akhilesh Singhania; Timothy Roscoe; Paul Barham; Rebecca Isaacs (May 2009). Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? (PDF). 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems. Monte Verità, Switzerland. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
• Adrian Schüpbach; Simon Peter; Andrew Baumann; Timothy Roscoe; Paul Barham; Tim Harris; Rebecca Isaacs (June 2008). Embracing diversity in the Barrelfish manycore operating system (PDF). Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems. Boston, MA, USA. Retrieved 2019-09-07.

External links

• Barrelfish.org
• Project Paper - "The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems" (PDF file)