![]() Unlike the last two prototype OSes(?), this one actually had potential, since I’m already writing command line C# applications, which it apparently supports. Unfortunately the development seems to be stalled right now. I was very excited when they announced Singularity, and was happy to see an open source release at Codeplex later on. I think what we’re seeing here is Microsoft hard at work trying to look not just at Windows in 2013, but the operating system in general in 2020. The Windows NT base system as it exists now is a pretty rock-solid piece of work which can certainly take on the competition, but as time progresses, there comes a moment where NT will no longer be the good choice. However, if you take a few steps back from the painting, I think all this could signify that the Redmond giant is looking at the future, a future where computers will have lots of different processing cores, who may not all share the same instruction set – for instance, the GPU who mostly just sits there wasting electrons in most machines. What do all these experimental operating systems from Microsoft’s research department mean? Well, individually, they mean very little. “Barrelfish focuses on gaining a fine-grained understanding of application requirements when running applications, while the focus of Helios is to export a single-kernel image across heterogenous coprocessors to make it easy for applications to take advantage of new hardware platforms,” the paper reads. What I do understand is that Helios and Barrelfish complement each other. The paper once again goes into quite some detail, a lot of which I simply do not fully understand (I’m looking at you, our dear and loving readers, again). Helios retargets applications to available ISAs by compiling from an intermediate language. Access to I/O services such as file systems are made transparent via remote message passing, which extends a standard microkernel message-passing abstraction to a satellite kernel infrastructure. Helios introduces satellite kernels, which export a single, uniform set of OS abstractions across CPUs of disparate architectures and performance characteristics. Helios is an operating system designed to simplify the task of writing, deploying, and tuning applications for heterogeneous platforms. The research paper written by the team behind Helios describes the operating system as follows: Helios is based on Singularity, but introduces support for satellite kernels, remote message passing, and affinity. ![]() Helios is also a project coming out of Microsoft Research, and it’s described as complementary to Barrelfish – in the research sense of the word. Now, we have a third contestant, and it’s called Helios. We had Singularity, a microkernel operating system written in managed code, and late last week we were acquainted with Barrelfish, a “multikernel” system which treats a multicore system as a network of independent cores, using ideas from distributed systems. It seems like Microsoft Research is really busy these days with research operating systems. ![]()
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