[Barrelfish-users] New Barrelfish release

[Kornilios Kourtis]

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce a new release for the Barrelfish OS. There
are roughly 200 changesets between this release and the previous one,
most of them a result of merging one of our internal development trees
that targeted improved networking support.

An overview of the changes included from this tree is:
- An (improved) driver for the Intel 82599 10Gbps NIC
- Improved support for PCI virtualization
- Bug fixes and performance improvements

A large part of the aforementioned work was done in the scope of two
student projects:

  - Antoine Kaufmann's Bachelor's thesis about a low-latency OS
    protocol stack, aimed to identify and eliminate latency issues in
    the Barrelfish network subsystem. As part of this thesis, a driver
    for the Intel 82599 10Gbps network controller was developed.
    http://www.barrelfish.org/kaufmanna-bachelor-low-latency.pdf

  - a Distributed Systems Lab project done by Reto Lindegger, Lukas
    Humbel, and Daniela Meier, entitled "Using virtualization for PCI
    device drivers". This project explored using a virtualized Linux
    kernel to provide driver support for PCI devices, by extending the
    Barrelfish virtual machine (VMKit).
    http://www.barrelfish.org/lindegger-humbel-meier-pci-virtualization.pdf

Finally, this release also includes an overhaul of Barrelfish
documentation. Many of the Barrelfish technical notes (TNs) were
updated, and we've also added 3 new ones:

 - TN 17: Barrelfish on ARM, that describes Barrelfish ARM support

 - TN 18: Barrelfish Practical Guide, that describes  how to build and
   boot Barrelfish on 64-bit PC hardware

 - TN 19: Device Drivers in Barrelfish, a how-to guide for writing
   device drivers for Barrelfish

You can find the TNs in our website, and you can also build them from the
Barrelfish source.

cheers,
Kornilios.

-- 
Kornilios Kourtis