The company Microsoft has been working on a new experimental operating systems, some elements are eventually incorporated into the basic operating system Microsoft Windows ─. In March last year, Microsoft introduced an operating system Singularity, an experimental operating system, which was designed to provide increased reliability, and to this end its kernel, device drivers, applications, etc. were written in a special managed code Sing # (extension of C #). Another test OS ─Midori (not to be confused with a Web browser), a kind of sandbox for the applications, providing security and designed to perform parallel applications, as well as various functions of cloud computing.

Among other recent developments should be mentioned Microsoft Windows Azure, operating system, designed specifically for cloud computing, which is now freely available to developers of software.

Now Microsoft has unveiled a new prototype of the next experimental operating system, codenamed "Barrelfish". OS Barrelfish optimized to run on multicore computers. In particular, in Barrelfish messaging and processing of databases is a process analogous to the transfer of information between the cores. Conventional operating systems use a scheme with shared memory, which is very inefficient at high system requirements for resources.

Work on the new OS is being jointly with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and the research arm Microsoft Research, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Interestingly, in Barrelfish use some third party libraries BSD open source software, which "covers the various BSD-like licenses of open source software." Because of this, rumors that the new operating system will be free, open source, but it's not something that is commonly associated with Microsoft.

According to the developers who participated in the conference on the new OS, Barrelfish bit like Midori and Singularity, in particular, from the standpoint of security.In addition, Barrelfish applications have an alternative route of access to information from devices such as video and sound cards. The central database stores a large amount of information about the devices to which the application fairly easy to access.

Writes developer "AudriUSA": "... instead of completely separate program from the device using the driver, Barrelfish is a kind of database, where there are many low-level hardware information. The kernel runs in a single stream without interruption. Planning combined with sending messages; the arrival of the message simply activates the waiting thread. It is also used something like the concept of a microkernel operating the drivers in a protected space.

Currently, Intel and AMD will expand its line of processors, and introduce a 4, 6 and 8-core model, ready to provide processors with an even greater number of nuclei. Soon after the effective use of these resources will meet the first operating system. It will be interesting to see what improvements Microsoft can create with Barrelfish, and how these improvements will be used in the successor Windows 7.