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Very interesting Nick.. keep us updated!
Microsoft working on a new research Operating system called Barrelfish
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Microsoft Research in Cambridge has teamed up with ETH Zurich Systems group to work on a new research operating system called Barrelfish which is being designed from the ground up, to cope with the demand of increasing number of processing cores, as well as the diversity in computer hardware. This is no the first time that Microsoft is working on a research operating system. Singularity was another research based operating system, the code of which is available for download on CodePlex.
The aims behind Barrelfish according to the official website running the OS itself are:We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.Barrelfish has been in the works since 2007 according to Mary Jo Foley. The teams working on Barrelfish have just released a preview version of the operating system for testing purposes which can be download here. Currently this prototype can do the following:–Runs on emulated and real hardwareA new more usable version will follow soon.
–Smallish set of drivers
–Can run web server, SQLite, slideshows, etc.
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who's going to be the first to download and install it?
yeah i remember reading about this a long time ago.
I can't make heads/tails of this.
Its like 4mb, I extracted it to a folder and got this
Attachment 29598
Last edited by Dark Nova Gamer; 15 Feb 2010 at 21:39.
....For further information and build instructions, please see the included README file.
Ahh ^_^ I'll have to install linux later >.>Code:########################################################################## Copyright (c) 2009, ETH Zurich and Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This file is distributed under the terms in the attached LICENSE file. If you do not find this file, copies can be found by writing to: ETH Zurich D-INFK, Haldeneggsteig 4, CH-8092 Zurich. Attn: Systems Group. ########################################################################## "SUPPORTED" HARDWARE Barrelfish currently runs on x86-64 CPUs. The following are known to work: * Intel Xeon Clovertown (X5355) and Gainestown (E5520) * AMD Opteron Santa Rosa, Barcelona, and Shanghai (2220, 8350, 8374 and 8380) The biggest compatibility problems are likely to be in the PCI/ACPI code. We usually discover new quirks (or missing functionality in the ACPI glue code) on each new machine we test. The following systems are known to work: * Intel x5000XVN * Tyan n6650W and S4985 * Supermicro H8QM3-2 * Dell PowerEdge R610 and R905 * Lenovo X200 and X301 laptops The e1000n driver should work with most recent Intel gigabit ethernet controllers (see the list in devices/e1000.dev). We've mostly used the 82572EI (PCI device ID 0x1082). You should also be able to boot Barrelfish on a recent version of QEMU (0.10); note that the e1000 device emulated by QEMU is not supported by our driver. REQUIRED TOOLS The following are required to build Barrelfish and its tools: * GCC 4 (4.3.3 and 4.3.4 are known to work; cross-compiling from i386 works) * GNU binutils (2.19 is known to work) * CMake v2.6 * GNU make * GHC v6.8.2 and Parsec 2.1 (earlier versions may work but are untested) * pdflatex (unfortunately CMake fails if this is not present, even when not building the documentation) Our build system may not be very portable; if in doubt, try building on a recent Debian or Ubuntu system, as these are what we use. BUILDING 1. Assuming you have already unpacked the sources, create a build directory: $ mkdir build && cd build 2. Run cmake, giving it the path to the source directory: $ cmake .. Lots of output should follow, including using GHC to compile various tools, and hopefully finishing up with: -- Configuring done -- Generating done -- Build files have been written to: .../barrelfish/build 3. Optionally, configure the compile-time parameters (such as debug output, build type, etc.) using a CMake configuration editor, eg: $ ccmake . 4. Run make, and wait... $ make 5. If everything worked, you should now be able to run Barrelfish inside QEMU: $ make sim (but see the note about broken shell output in KNOWN ISSUES below). INSTALLING AND BOOTING Barrelfish requires a Multiboot-compliant bootloader that is capable of loading an ELF64 image. At the time of writing, this doesn't include the default GRUB. Your options are either: * patch GRUB to support a 64-bit kernel image, using the patch found here: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?17963 * use the pre-loader "elver" that can be found in the tools directory "Installing" Barrelfish currently consists of copying the ELF files for the CPU driver and user programs to a location that the target machine can boot from, and writing a suitable menu.lst file that instructs the bootloader (GRUB) which programs to load and the arguments to pass them. If you specify an appropriate INSTALL_PREFIX in the CMake configuration, eg: $ cmake -DINSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/tftpboot/barrelfish . ... then running 'make install' will copy all the binaries to the right place for you. We usually boot Barrelfish via PXE/TFTP, although loading from a local disk also works. Instructions for setting up GRUB to do this are beyond the scope of this document. Assuming you have such a setup, here is a sample menu.lst file for a basic diskless boot that doesn't do anything useful beyond probing the PCI buses: title Barrelfish root (nd) kernel /barrelfish/elver module /barrelfish/kernel loglevel=4 logmask=0 module /barrelfish/init module /barrelfish/mem_serv module /barrelfish/monitor bootcpus=0-3 module /barrelfish/chips module /barrelfish/skb module /barrelfish/pci Notice the bootcpus argument to the monitor program. This specifies ranges of cores (identified by their APIC IDs) to boot. This must presently be passed as a parameter (or by default the system will boot only on the BSP core) -- to find out that valid APIC IDs for your system, look at the debug output from the PCI domain when it starts up, or use the APIC IDs reported by another OS. There are many other programs you can load (take a look around the usr tree for examples). To start a program on a core other than the BSP core, pass 'core=N' (where N is an APIC ID) as its first argument. If things work, you should see output on both the VGA console and COM1. KNOWN ISSUES There are many. Those you're likely to encounter include: * Parallel builds don't work reliably. A workaround is to first 'make errors'. * The documentation is incomplete and out of date. * Some drivers and user programs are known not to build, and are commented-out in the CMakeLists.txt files. * The shell (fish) doesn't work. Actually, it works, but its output is confused by line buffering in libterm. In any case, it doesn't do much of use yet! * As we are not using IOAPICs yet, device interrupts work only on the BSP core. LIKELY FAQs Q: How do I run a program? A: Add it to the boot sequence by specifying the module in your menu.lst file. For example, to run the memtest program, add the line: module /PATH/memtest to the end of menu.lst, where PATH is relative either to your TFTP server's root directory (when booting on hardware) or to your build directory (when using a simulator such as QEMU). If memtest runs, you should see it output "memtest passed successfully!". Q: Where's the CPU driver? A: It's in the directory named kernel :) But don't worry, it really does run independently on each core. Q: Where is the source for the SPLASH2 benchmarks? It seems to be missing. A: The license for these prevents redistribution, so we were forced to ship our changes as a patch. See usr/splash2/README for further instructions. Q: Can I use a debugger? A: Maybe. There are two options at the moment: * On a simulator, using whatever debug interfaces it supports. For QEMU, you could try the "debugsim" target. * On hardware, using the kernel-mode remote GDB stubs that operate on the primary serial port and are entered in response to a kernel trap or exception. However, these are not well maintained, and may not be usable beyond reading/writing memory locations and inspecting the stack. When debugging the kernel, beware that it is relocated to an address determined at core boot time. Look for output such as: "Kernel starting at address 0xffffffffc072b000". Q: Where can I find more information, including papers and new releases? A: http://www.barrelfish.org/ Q: Can I contribute? A: We'd certainly like to hear from you. Please send us mail.
This seems to be a fairly strait forward compile job in Linux, and shouldnt be that difficult Steve... let me know if you have any problems or would like some help..