Microsoft unveils Barrelfish multi-core optimized OS
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Sep 29th 2009 7:33PM
posted Sep 29th 2009 7:33PM
With current operating systems, as the number of cores increases efficiency decreases. Microsoft Research has just announced an experimental OS, called Barrelfish, that they're developing in conjunction with ETH Zurich, in the hopes that they'll learn how to buck that trend -- both with current and future hardware. Building upon lessons learned with projects including Midori and Singularity, Barrelfish eschews share memory schemes in favor of message passing and a kind of database that shuttles information between cores. Heady stuff, for sure -- but just the kind of thing that sets off our Geek Alarms. If you can't wait to check this one out for yourself, hit the read link for the first release snapshot, in all its Open Source glory. The rest of us will probably remain content waiting to see how this new-found knowledge will trickle down to Windows 7 users in the future.
[Via DailyTech]
[Via DailyTech]
PETA lawsuit in 3...2....1...
I think it's pretty amazing what Microsoft Research is pulling out lately
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
Barrel Fish - are you kidding me.....Curious Carp???
Simply terrible and who says MS can't screw up their tablet, despite how promising the concept videos look???
Yes.
This new experimental OS that is "exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems", and that no one has used is full of fail and means that MS will screw up their tablet pc.
Which turns into Gyarados OS;
Gyarados OS is infamously known for its fierce temper and wanton destructive tendencies. Once it has worked itself into a frenzy, it will not calm until everything around it is destroyed—this tendency is attributed to the dramatic structural changes its brain undergoes during evolution. It seems attracted to violence, although this Pokémon is very rarely seen in the wild. During times of human conflict Gyarados are said to appear, burning entire cities down to the ground.
Sounds like Microsoft to me :D
Woah fanboi alert going off right now.
Obviously you've had a bad day, first Microsoft announces an awesome looking tablet that clearly blows any apple tablet rumors out of the water. Then we get this annoucement of OS research being done. Apple fanboi apparently has his panties all in a bunch over all the good Microsoft annoucements today.
"Which turns into Gyarados OS; "
Woah man, I think you meant "evolves into."
Gyrad DOS?
Er.. minus the extra d.. uhm.. oh, stupid comment system!
Microsoft has been doing some very good things lately... Zune HD, Windows 7, Microsoft Security Essentials for free, Microsot Courier Windows Mobile 6.5, and now this...
Very good Microsoft... very good.
Hmm not sure about that winmo 6.5, sure there's some good skins out there but it's still same old winmo.
You have very low expectations and standards..
@Badget
The same old skin argument is dead, get over it. Using said argument pretty much proves one thing, that you haven't used WM6.5. It's similar LOOKING, but it far, FAR more advanced than 6.1.
@Terry
You have no life.
Windows mobile is on the right track but I won't be coming back any time soon until
they 1) skin all of the os such as the volume scrubber and soft buttons. The latest builds of 6.5 seem to be getting there.
2) have a better multitasking implementation such as the cards on the palm pre. The ability to limit
the amount of apps (third party and proprietary) open at a set time.
I love how windows mobile can multitask, and is very open to the point where you can pretty much use any programs and applications you please. There are just a couple drawbacks I would like adressed. Oh! And they should like have a like a higher minimium hardware speqs for a licence.
...Project Natal, Dreamspark, f-ing awesome Silverlight variable streaming technology... (my favorites)
i know someone didn't just praise that craptastic silverlight technology that "helpfully" *cough automatically with no user control cough* downgrades my video quality in the middle of a netflix movie for no good reason and doesn't allow me to, oh i don't know, choose a higher quality and wait longer to buffer the video? but yeah, good old microsoft here to show us how they will be treating multi-core processors 10 years from now while Snow Leopard is letting us use a lot more of our multi-core processing power RIGHT NOW. the MS shills are really getting quite sickening lately..
"Microsoft has been doing some very good things lately"
And Ballmer taking a paycut...
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26145641-15306,00.html
I love windows 7, but winmo 6.5(.1) is a joke, yes i give it to MS that they try hard , but 6.5 looks like several OS's cut and pasted together, the UI is far from uniformed, and it still looks like alpha software to me + it's still have some very old issues not resolved yet, like the 65k color limit and no true Unicode support, specially for complex script and RTL languages.
let see if mobile 7 be as good as it's desktop sibling.
@Devin Brown
You're an idiot, you're blaming the Silverlight technology for the buffer problem? God, you are dumb, don't you think that the geniuses at Netflix are the ones that actually MADE the movie player you're using? God, go bash MS somewhere where you know what the fuck you're talking about.
And about the Snow Leopard comment, I'm sure glad MS doesn't make me press a key combination to actually use 64bit. Wow, you are a delusional Apple fanboy, or should I say "shill".
Microsoft needs more MSR, less stupid marketing and Fisher-Price usability. MSR does excellent work, but the products inevitably get dumbed down by business drones. Technology needs to rule once again.
It's as easy as shooting all of the fish in the barrel at once.
With multiple guns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd-MpXCMcIs
with a sawed off shotgun
Heady stuff? Excuse me?
I guess they cant say ballsy....
Sounds like they're gonna use a BizTalk type communications foundation within the OS... interesting!
First "Gene Bar" and now "Barrel Fish".
May I suggest getting a new creative team?
It's a research project. It's nothing anywhere like a product yet and the marketing team haven't gone to work on it.
You do realize that a Barrelfish is an actual fish, right?
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/04etta/background/barrelfish/media/barrelfish2.html
Right?
It doesn't really matter that it's a real fish name... it's just a dumb name for a potentially cool project.
iPod was a dumb name when it first was released
Wii was even more dumb when it was first announced
Bing? Google?
Seems to me all the stuff with dumb names are hittin it big.
All the names you listed were all not pre-existing words prior to their release, and none of them are named after fish. While product titles aren't very connected to the products success, a good name probably helps popularity. I hope this project turns out better than the cool level of it's name.
Hate to break it to you Bri Bri, but google and bing are words...well at least google is based off of googol ( a big number). And bing means "to go" which is probably why microsoft uses it in their slogans like they do.
@Jordan: I don't Vista is pretty dumb name and we all how it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol
sure the spelling's different but Google is still named after it.
I thought of that as well, but Vista was a pretty common word before the OS was released.
Screw that drop a hand grenade in the barrel.
I may be wrong, but I thought benchmarks showed that the more cores you have performance doesn't decrease, but the gain in performance decreases?
huh? Not sure where you heard that. Gains in performances may decrease in terms of a single core, however multiple cores will DRASTICALLY improve performance overall. That's part of building this multi-core optimized OS, currently Win7/Vista a lot of other OSes support Multiple cores and multiple processors, but applications developers aren't taking full advantage of them.
Anyway! I believe this is not for regular consumers, I'm guessing this is more for cloud/servers, as this is a distributed OS.. built to spread tasks between an multiple cores/processors/machines.
It is called diminishing returns. More processing cores will at some point cause more overhead than the added core gives you in processing power.
If you are using a shared cache, the overhead of taking looks to keep the cache in sync increases as the number of cores increases.
yes, the first sentence should read:
"With current operating systems, as the number of cores increases EFFICIENCY decreases."
@ Maveric
When your talking about an OS a decrease in efficiency is a decrease in performance. The sentence is fine the way it is.
Law of diminishing returns.
Garp is right.
You reach a point of saturation eventually where adding more cores only improves your performance by a marginal amount, so you get less out of it than you put into it (performance vs dollars) beyond a certain threshold.
Joseph L. Flatley's statement was incorrect though, at least totally inaccurate if not altogether incorrect.
As someone who works on machines with lots of cores. ... You get great improvement in speed (almost double) if you can run seperate processes on each core that deal with completely different memory. The main problem is most normal desktop use don't do that, plus if you have to make a system call, you often wait on the OS which runs on one cpu. (Semeaphores/ locks and memory management by definition need to remain coherent. across all cores)
Now a lot of applications are Threaded processes running on seperate cores accessing the same memory, but again you have an extra layer to make sure that the memory is in a proper state when each thread is working on it (thread a isn't working on data while thread b is waiting for the result, or worse using out of date data), and that is not a completely insignificant overhead.
The article is short on details on what this new approach gets you. Besides now having to work in the small memory space in cache. I can't believe they think message passing will be faster than shared memory. Where you going to store the message? This sounds like it will require new thinking in application development, at a time when programs are just starting to get more threaded.
@amx
I believe that the idea with barrelfish is two accomplish exactly what you are saying when you said "You get great improvement in speed (almost double) if you can run seperate processes on each core that deal with completely different memory", You are right the article is short on details but don't be afraid to explore, Look what I found.
"Barrel fish is an instance of a multikernel operating system.
In such an OS, every core hosts one kernel, called the CPU driver in Barrel fish.
All kernels are essentially independent. State is not shared but replicated as
needed among the different cores."
that only kinda makes since to me but you may understand it better, There's much more... here
http://www.barrelfish.org/sandrini-masters-vmkit.pdf
Here
http://www.barrelfish.org/barrelfish_sosp09.pdf
and here
http://www.barrelfish.org/
MS just might be on to something here.
wow, it's about time microsoft started throwing money at the development and not the marketing. nice fish!
That's what I thought.. so the article is a little inaccurate in saying:
"With current operating systems, as the number of cores increases performance decreases"
That's just not true. More cores = better performance, to a certain point.