Inferno (operating system)

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Infobox OS Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services. The name of the operating system and of its associated programs, as well as of the company Vita Nuova that produced it, were inspired by the literary heritage of Dante Alighieri, particularly the Divine Comedy.

Inferno runs in hosted mode under several different operating systems or natively on a range of hardware architectures. In each configuration the operating system presents the same standard interfaces to its applications. A communications protocol called Styx is applied uniformly to access both local and remote resources. As of the fourth edition of Inferno, Styx is identical to Plan 9's newer version of its hallmark 9P protocol, 9P2000.

Applications are written in the type-safe Limbo programming language, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms, and is executed using Just-in-time compilation techniques in a virtual machine.

Contents 1 Design principles 2 Ports 3 License 4 See also 5 External links

Design principles

Inferno is a distributed operating system based on three basic principles:

• Resources as files: all resources are represented as files within a hierarchical file system
• Namespaces: the application view of the network is a single, coherent namespace that appears as a hierarchical file system but may represent physically separated (locally or remotely) resources
• Standard communication protocol: a standard protocol, called Styx, is used to access all resources, both local and remote

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Ports

Inferno runs directly on native hardware and also as an application providing a Virtual Operating System over other platforms. Applications can be developed and run on all Inferno platforms without modification or recompilation.

Native ports include: x86. MIPS, XScale, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC.

Hosted or Virtual OS ports include: Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Plan 9, Mac OS X, Solaris, Irix, Unixware.

Inferno can also be hosted by a plugin to Internet Explorer. According to Vita Nuova plugins for others browsers are currently underway. [1]

License

The Inferno 4th edition was released in early 2005 as Free Software under a mixture of Open Source licenses (GPL, LGPL, Lucent Public or MIT License, depending on the component). Vita Nuova also offers a conventional non-copyleft Commercial License for those who do not wish to license their changes under the default viral Free Software scheme.

See also

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• Plan 9 from Bell Labs
• Singularity
• Unix

External links

Vita Nuova

• Inferno home page
• Inferno browser plugin
• Inferno Fourth Edition Download, including source code
• Inferno design principles
• Documentation
• Mailing list and other resources
• Screenshots

Other links

• Unoffical FAQ
• Inferno programmer's notebook - A journal made by an Inferno user
• Inferno tutorial at the University of Reading e-Science Centre
• The Inferno wiki powered by Wikifsde:Inferno (Betriebssystem)

es:Inferno fr:Inferno (Système d'exploitation) pl:Inferno uk:Inferno