[Barrelfish-users] New Barrelfish release

[Andrew Baumann]

Dear all,

Just in time for Christmas, we've released a second snapshot of the Barrelfish 
research operating system. You can find it here: 
http://www.barrelfish.org/release_20091219.html

Highlights of this release include:
     * Hake, our new (home-grown) build system. As well as fixing a lot of
       annoyances we had with CMake, this allows us to build binaries for
       multiple architectures concurrently in the same build tree. For
       details, see doc/Hake.tex in the source tree.
     * A new event tracing framework and visualisation tool (Aquarium), as
       demonstrated in the poster session at SOSP'09. For details on running
       this, see tools/demo/guide.pdf in the source tree.
     * The Filet-o-Fish (FoF) framework for domain-specific languages, and
       two DSLs, Fugu and Hamlet, using it in Barrelfish. Further details can
       be found in the FoF paper from PLOS'09 and in Pierre-Evariste Dagand's
       Masters Thesis.
     * VMkit, an x86_64 virtual machine monitor for Barrelfish, using the AMD
       SVM hardware extensions (with nested paging support). Futher details
       are in Raffaele Sandrini's Masters Thesis.
     * The USB driver stack described in Animesh Trivedi's Masters Thesis.
     * Initial (incomplete) ports to ARM, x86_32 and Beehive architectures.
       We do not expect these to be usable by anyone yet.
     * A more usable shell.
     * The APIC interrupt model is now used exclusively (including IOAPICs),
       allowing drivers to run on any core and have their interrupts routed
       correctly.

Share and enjoy,
Andrew (on behalf of the Barrelfish team)