Inferno (operating system)

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.

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 (9p2000), is used to access all resources, both local and remote

Plan9 ancestry

Inferno and Plan9 share a common ancestor, which would be Plan9 at about 1996. They share the same design principles, though there are differences:

plan9 userland runs native, mostly written in C with a tiny bit of assembler.

inferno userland runs through a bytecode interpreter or JIT (dis), mostly developed in a programming language called limbo.

the plan9 kernel is a "typical monolithic" kernel.

inferno kernel is an old plan9 kernel with unnecessary cruft stripped off and includes a virtual machine.

plan9 kernel switches between user mode (userland) and supervisor mode (kernel).

inferno never leaves supervisor mode (kernel) but provides protection through the use of a virtual machine.

Inferno is quite similar to Java virtual machine, except that Limbo is arguably a better programming language than Java. Limbo's virtual machine, unlike the Java virtual machine so far, can be run on bare hardware without a host operating system.

You can not develop userland stuff for Inferno in C, at all. It has to run on the Limbo's virtual machine, which implies you must use Limbo.

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. ^*

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 Free Software scheme.

External links

Vita Nuova

Other links

Unofficial 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 Wikifs

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Design principles

Plan9 ancestry

Ports

License

See also

External links