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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: Plan 9 ancestry Inferno and Plan 9 share a common ancestor, an operating system from about 1996. They share the same design principles, though there are differences: Inferno is somewhat similar to Java Virtual Machine. However, Limbo's virtual machine, unlike the Java Virtual Machine so far, can be run on bare hardware without a host operating system. Ports Inferno runs directly on native hardware and also as an application providing a virtual operating system which runs on 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. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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