Inferno (operating system)
Inferno is a distributed computer operating system that comes from the Bell Laboratories.
Inferno is based on Plan 9, an operating system that follows the Unix philosophy that every communication has to be done with the operating system files. For the original design of Inferno among others, the developer Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie were responsible.
Inferno is written in the C programming language. However, the language Limbo is used for programming of application programs such as Java bytecode produced, which is executed by a virtual machine. Inferno has minimal hardware requirements: it will run on systems without a memory management unit and only 1 MB of memory.
Each user program communicates with its environment via virtual files that can also display devices, process information, network connection points, etc. in addition to normal files. Through a common protocol, Styx, can be accessed locally and over the network. The protocol allows the passage of the Dateihierachie ( "walk" = walk ) and the classic file operations such as "read" (read) and "write" (write). Access to devices is accomplished via file name, such as / dev / mouse ( mouse) or / dev / screen ( screen). The screen and the mouse can be there on another computer, the access happens transparently over the network. Each application program sees it his own version of a file or device. / dev / mouse, for example, only provides data to the application program when the associated window is active.
Inferno is like Unix delivered in the 1970s with a complete development environment including C compiler. It runs as a standalone operating system on computers with multiple processors such as x86, Intel XScale, IBM PowerPC, PA -RISC, ARM, StrongARM, MIPS and Sun SPARC. In addition, the operation is possible on a host system such as Linux ( x86), FreeBSD, Solaris, or Plan 9, experimentally on Android smartphones. Even under the Microsoft Internet Explorer, it runs with the help of a plug-in. Since the bytecode of Limbo applications is the same for each architecture, Inferno applications can run anywhere without recompilation.
Inferno has been marketed since 2000 by Vita Nuova Inc., York, England and further developed. The source code is available with a GPL -like license.