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Inferno (operating system)
Overview
Distributed operating system
A distributed operating system is the logical aggregation of operating system software over a collection of independent, networked, communicating, and spatially disseminated computational nodes. Individual system nodes each hold a discrete software subset of the global aggregate operating system...
started at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...
, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability. The name of the operating system and many of its associated programs, as well as that of the current company, were inspired by Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Divine Comedy.
Inferno applications are portable across a broad mix of hardware, networks, and environments.
It defines a virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
, known as Dis
Dis virtual machine
The Dis virtual machine is the execution environment for application code in the Inferno operating system. Its design is based on a register machine, closely modeling CISC-like architectures on which it runs...
, that
can be implemented on any real machine, provides Limbo, a type-safe language
that is compiled to portable byte code,
and, more significantly, it includes a virtual operating system
that supplies the same interfaces whether Inferno
runs natively on hardware or is hosted as an application on other systems.
A communications protocol
Communications protocol
A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...
called Styx is applied uniformly
to access both local and remote resources, which applications
use by calling standard file operations, open, read, write, and close.
As of the fourth edition of Inferno, Styx is identical to Plan 9
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...
's newer version of its hallmark 9P
9P
9P is a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of connecting the components of a Plan 9 system. Files are key objects in Plan 9. They represent windows, network connections, processes, and almost anything else available in the operating...
protocol, 9P2000.
Inferno was first made in 1995 by members of Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
' Computer Science Research division to bring ideas of Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...
to a wider range of devices and networks.
