Barrelfish (operating system)

Barrelfish is an experimental computer operating system built by ETH Zurich with the assistance of Microsoft Research in Cambridge. It is an experimental operating system designed from the ground up for scalability for computers built with multi-core processors with the goal of reducing the compounding decrease in benefit as more CPUs are used in a computer by putting low-level hardware information in a database, thus removing the need for driver software.

The partners released the first snapshot of the OS on September 15, 2009 with a second being released in March, 2011. Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the MIT license. Snapshots are regularly released, the last one dating to March 23, 2020.

While originally being developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, it is now partly supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware.