[Barrelfish] [Barrelfish-users] Barrelfish vs. Plan9?

[Timothy Roscoe]

Hi Stefan, 

We think Plan9 is a pretty nice operating system, and for people who
actually want to get work done on parallel computers, we'd certainly
recommend any one of a number of mature, well-maintained and supported
systems rather than our code base.

Barrelfish is very much a research project in itself - our conjecture
is that adopting a very different internal structure to existing
operating systems will lead to an OS which is a better match for
future hardware on the one hand, and the new concurrent languages
coming out of research on the other.  

We're researchers rather than software developers, and our goals in
building Barrelfish are to try out new ideas - the main reason we have
released the code open source at this point is to support our research
publications.  Conversely, the quality of code you'll find in
Barrelfish, while something we're not embarassed about, is not what
you might find in a mature open-source or commercial system with tens
of thousands of active users. 

Best regards, 

 -- Timothy Roscoe

At Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:14:53 +0200, nocturnal <swehack at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bare with me as i'm just starting to read the PDF detailing your new OS.
> 
> One question immediately popped into my head though, what is your motivation
> behind creating a new project for something like this and not following, or
> forking, an already existing open source project such as Plan9?
> 
> Personally i feel that Plan9 has become very mature in the parallel
> computing world and would rather see people focusing their efforts on one
> project instead of scattering their efforts on several immature projects.
> 
> --
> 
> 
> Med vänliga hälsningar
> 
> Stefan Midjich aka nocturnal
> [SWEHACK] http://swehack.se