Barrelfish is an experimental computer operating system built by ETH Zurich with the assistance of Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

[1][2][3] It is an experimental operating system designed from the ground up for scalability for computers built with multi-core processors with the goal of reducing the compounding decrease in benefit as more CPUs are used in a computer by putting low-level hardware information in a database, thus removing the need for driver software.

Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the MIT license.

[1] Snapshots are regularly released, the last one dating to March 23, 2020.

[7][8][9] While originally being developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, it was also partly supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware before it was discontinued.