From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:32:00 -1000 From: Tim Newsham To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: Re: [9fans] Barrelfish Topicbox-Message-UUID: 86e57914-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > If you look at the core of Barrelfish, you'll see that this is essentially > what they are doing -- essentially using an extremely small microkernel (like > L4) that's very > efficient at various forms of message passing. That's the only thing that is > duplicated on the various cores. The services themselves can be distributed > and/or replicated as appropriate (although their approach favors replication) > -- it all depends on the characteristics of the workload. it sounds like the kernel (L4-like, supposedly tuned to the specific hardware) and the "monitor" (userland, portable) are shared, from the paper. Btw, they have the source code up for free (http://www.barrelfish.org/release_20090914.html) which I supposed could be used to more definitively answer these questions with some effort... > -eric Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/