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 produces it, were inspired by the literary works 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 may be executed using
Just-in-time Compilation techniques
in a
Virtual Machine .
Inferno is a
Distributed Operating System based on three basic principles:
- all Resources are represented as files within a Hierarchical File System
- 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
- a standard protocol, called Styx (9p2000), is used to access all resources, both local and remote
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 .
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 underway.[http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/pidoc/index.html Plugins], Vita Nuova.
Inferno 4th edition was released in early
2005 as
Free Software . Specifically, it was
Dual-licensed under two sets of licences. Users could either obtain it under a set of
Free Software Licences , or they could obtain it under a more traditional commercial licence. In the case of the free software licence scheme, different parts of the system were covered by different licences, including the
GNU General Public License , the
GNU Lesser General Public License , the
Lucent Public License , and the
MIT Licence . Subsequently Vita Nuova has made it possible to acquire the entire system (excluding the fonts, which are sub-licenced from
Bigelow And Holmes ) under the
GPLv2 . All three licence options are currently available.
The textbook ''Inferno Programming with Limbo'' ISBN 0470843527 (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), by and Howard Trickey, was intended to provide the operating-system-centric point of view, but was unfortunately never completed/released by its authors.
