Barrelfish is an open-source operating system that is no longer in use. It was created by researchers from ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research. The idea for the operating system began in 2006 with Timothy Roscoe and Paul Barham, and it was officially introduced in September 2009. The last version of Barrelfish was released on March 23, 2020.

The goal of the Barrelfish project was to design an operating system that could manage the growing number of processor cores in modern computers. It aimed to collect information about the computer’s hardware to help it make better decisions about how to organize tasks and move data. The system was also planned to work with other operating systems, such as Linux and Microsoft Windows. The team behind Barrelfish used ideas from earlier research, including a project called Nemesis, which Roscoe and Barham had worked on before.

Name origin

The name was inspired by the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel," which described the easy and efficient way the operating system was planned to work. It was first developed with Microsoft Research and also received support from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware before it was discontinued.