Microsoft Unveils "Barrelfish", a New Multi-core OS

From DailyTech: Microsoft has long cooked up new and experimental operating systems whose features eventually got rolled into its central Windows offerings. Most recently it's been dabbling with Singularity, an experimental OS designed for increased reliability thanks to kernel, device drivers, and applications being written in managed SING# (an extension of C#) code. Another test OS is Midori (not to be confused with the web browser), an OS that sandboxes applications for security and is designed for running concurrent applications, a feature geared towards cloud computing schemes.

Other recent efforts include its Windows Azure OS, a cloud computing OS currently offered for free to developers.

Now Microsoft has unveiled another new OS prototype codenamed "Barrelfish". Barrelfish is an OS optimized to run on multi-core machines. Namely, Barrelfish uses message passing and a database like system to pass information between cores. Typically OS's use share memory schemes, which become very inefficient when resource demands are high.

View: Article @ Source Site