Microsoft's BarrelFish Multi-Kernel Operating System Architecture.
Microsoft has a new pet-project: Barrelfish, a multi-kernel operating system (via OS News). As a bit of back story, a kernel is the meat of an operating system. The kernel is largely responsible for enabling other software to make use of hardware.
In the research team’s article The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems they write “We investigate a new OS structure, the multikernel, that treats the machine as a network of independent cores, assumes no inter-core sharing at the lowest level, and moves traditional OS functionality to a distributed system of processes that communicate via message-passing,”.
This is really good stuff! From a hardware perspective, this is exactly where the future is headed. When I took “Distributed & Network Programming” I remember the class getting Dr. Allan off on a tangent about how a single computer these days is really a distributed system.
A “distributed system” is generally thought of multiple computers networked together and working together. This idea was popularized when “a computer” was a pretty straight forward idea. A computer consisted of a processor, some main memory, possibly some persistent memory, and some input/output. Today’s computers are much more complex. A video card often has it’s own dedicated main-memory and set of multiple-processors. Hard disk drives are beginning to contain embedded systems to encrypt data saved on the disks. Even main memory is not a straightforward concept these days, not with virtual memory which requires and additional piece of hardware called a memory management unit. A “personal computer” is a series of smaller computers (video cards, hard drives, processors, etc…) networked together. This will be a continuing trend, which will require much more complex operating systems to manage the hardware. This is why I’m so excited over BarrelFish!
I think the Dinosaur Book will be needing a new chapter! (aaaaawww yeeeaaahhh… the Dinosaur Book – you know it!)
I hope Microsoft Open-Sources BarrelFish like they did Singularity, which was their research OS
in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications were all written in managed code.
