Microsoft Barrelfish resources: Download, FAQ
I saw this news item in the morning that Microsoft has released a super-amazing OS called the Barrelfish. Almost got a heart attack, then realised that the Barrelfish is an operating system alright but hardly a proper working OS as I thought. Took a little time to slow down my heartbeat, I must say.
Anyway, at this point, as a consumer, there is nothing much for you to get excited about Barrelfish. My first thought was to go look for screenshots and maybe some downloadable EXE but apparently that is not possible.
Barrelfish is purely geek stuff at this moment. It is intended as a research operating system for the ‘hardware of the future’, and I very clearly have ‘hardware of the present’ in my PC. Barrelfish is written specifically for multicore environments. Microsoft has created the OS in collaboration with Systems Group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and in the Systems and Networking Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK.
Microsoft says that they see two trends: The rapidly growing number of cores in processors which leads to a scalability challenge, and secondly, diversity in computer hardware which is increasing, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
You can download a snapshot of the Barrelfish Operating System, though this is not for most of us.
Barrelfish Operating System FAQ
Microsoft site page on Barrelfish OS
Barrelfish OS screenshots: Coming soon?!