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08.
04.
2009
The Barrelfish OS for Heterogeneous Multicore Systems
Andrew Baumann
ETH Zürich
Barrelfish is a new open-source operating system for heterogeneous
multicore systems being developed at ETH Zurich, in conjunction with
Microsoft Research Cambridge. We seek to tackle two closely-related
problems: scalability to many cores, and hardware diversity, which
even in a single machine is increasing together with the available
parallelism.
Barrelfish treats a multicore machine more as a networked system
than as a single, monolithic computer, using an OS architecture we
term "Multikernel". Each core runs an independent kernel instance,
with cross-core consistency provided by user-space tasks employing
ideas from distributed systems. We also apply
knowledge-representation techniques to allow the OS and applications
to reason about the richness of the hardware at runtime, and to
control scheduling and resource allocation decisions.
This talk will discuss the implications of these ideas on the
structure of an OS, and the current status and future directions of
the system.
Slides (PDF)
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