Early experience with the barrelfish OS and the single-chip cloud computer

Abstract

Traditional OS architectures based on a single, shared-memory kernel face significant challenges from hardware trends, in particular the increasing cost of system-wide cachecoherence as core counts increase, and the emergence of heterogeneous architectures - both on a single die, and also between CPUs, co-processors like GPUs, and programmable peripherals within a platform. The multikernel is an alternative OS model that employs message passing instead of data sharing and enables architectureagnostic inter-core communication, including across non-coherent shared memory and PCIe peripheral buses. This allows a single OS instance to manage the complete collection of heterogeneous, non-cache-coherent processors as a single, unified platform. We report on our experience running the Barrelfish research multikernel.