Barrelfish: A Study In Distributed Operating Systems On Multicore Architectures Part - 1

Barrelfish is a new research operating system developed by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research. It is based on the multikernel model, a reference design for multicore operating systems that is premised on the observation that computer hardware looks increasingly like a network, and so the operating system should look like a distributed system. In this talk I will motivate why current and future multicore architectures require a new structure for the operating system and describe the multikernel approach. I will then present Barrelfish, which is an implementation of the multikernel model, and explore a couple of uses of agreement protocols within Barrelfish to keep operating system state consistent.