Inferno® is a distributed operating system, originally developed at Bell Labs, but now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova® as Free Software. Applications written in Inferno's concurrent programming language, Limbo, are compiled to its portable virtual machine code (Dis), to run anywhere on a network in the portable environment that Inferno provides. Unusually, that environment looks and acts like a complete operating system.
The use of a high-level language and virtual machine is sensible but mundane. The interesting thing is the system's representation of services and resources. They are represented in a file-like name hiearchy. Programs access them using only the file operations open, read/write, and close. The 'files' may of course represent stored data, but may also be devices, network and protocol interfaces, dynamic data sources, and services. The approach unifies and provides basic naming, structuring, and access control mechanisms for all system resources. A single file-service protocol (called Styx or 9P2000) makes all those resources available for import or export throughout the network in a uniform way, independent of location. An application simply attaches the resources it needs to its own per-process name hierarchy ('name space').
The system can be used to build portable client and server applications. It makes it straightforward to build lean applications that share all manner of resources over a network, without the cruft of much of the 'Grid' software one sees.
Inferno can run 'native' on various ARM, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 platforms but also 'hosted', under an existing operating system (including FreeBSD, Irix, Linux, MacOS X, Plan 9, and Solaris), again on various processor types.
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Ohloh Analysis Summary
- Mostly written in C/C++
- Few source code comments
- Small development team
- Mozilla Public License 1.0 may conflict with GPL
Updated 12 Oct 2008 04:19 UTC
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News
Plan 9 Authentication in Linux
Ashwin Ganti has continued the great work he started as unofficial
participant at [the 2007 Google Summer of
Code](http://gsoc.cat-v.org), and recently he published an excellent
[paper describing his efforts to bring the Plan 9 cap device
Roundup of 9P library updates
Various [9P](http://9p.cat-v.org)
[implementations](http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations) have seen
recent updates.
* [Libixp](http://repo.cat-v.org/libixp) continues its yearly release
schedule ;) and [sqweek has announced the
The Trace Device lost on its way to Greece
In an unplanned preview of IWP9, Ron Minnich has released a paper on a
new
kernel trace device for Plan 9; unfortunately he and his coauthors
John Floren
and Aki Nyrhinen could not attend IWP9 this year so they decided to
post
Registration for IWP9 opens
The registration period for the [Third International Workshop for Plan
9 and Inferno](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/) has opened.
To register send an e-mail with your name, affiliation and email
address (in
one line each) to
Inferno ported to the OpenMoko
Masha Rabinovich has got hosted Inferno to run on the OpenMoko
cellphone
platform. There is a [google code inferno-openmoko
project](http://code.google.com/p/inferno-openmoko/) with the source
code for the port.
So far the port even has the JIT working!
- Homepage
- http://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/
- Licensed under
- GNU General Public License 2.0, GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1, Lucent Public License, and MIT License
- Tagged as
-
bell_labs 9p distributed_systems virtual_file_system portable messaging distributed_computing grid distributed networking filesystem middleware virtual_machines distributed_programming plan9 concurrency utf-8
|
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Where in the world?
Related Projects by Tags
acme-sac, Apache ActiveMQ, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Plan 9 from User Space, xcpu
Project Cost |
|
|---|---|
| This calculator estimates how much it would cost to hire a team to write this project from scratch. More » | |
| Include | |
| Codebase | 741,064 |
| Effort (est.) | 205 Person Years |
| Avg. Salary | $ year |
| $ 11,296,141 | |
