Inferno (operating system)

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inferno
Inferno 4th Edition
Inferno 4th Edition
developer Bell Laboratories / Vita Nuova Inc.
License (s) GPL- like license
Current  version 4e (March 28, 2015)
ancestry UNIX
↳ Plan9
↳ inferno
Architecture (s) x86 , XScale , PowerPC , PA-RISC , StrongARM , MIPS , SPARC
www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

Inferno is a distributed computer - operating system , which by the Bell Laboratories comes.

Inferno is based on Plan 9 , an operating system that follows the Unix philosophy that all communication with the operating system must take place via files. The developers Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie were responsible for the original design of Inferno .

Inferno is written in the C programming language. However, the Limbo language is used for programming application programs , which, like Java, produces bytecode that is executed by a virtual machine . Inferno has minimal hardware requirements: it runs on systems without a memory management unit and with only 1 MB of RAM .

Each user program communicates with its environment via virtual files which, in addition to normal files, can also represent devices, process information , network connection points, etc. It can be accessed locally as well as via the network using a common protocol, Styx . The protocol allows you to run through the file hierarchy ( walk ) and the classic file operations such as read and write . Devices are accessed using file names such as / dev / mouse (mouse) or / dev / screen (screen). The screen and the mouse can be on another computer, and access then takes place transparently via the network. Each application program sees its own version of a file or device. For example, / dev / mouse only delivers data to the application program if the associated window is also active.

Like Unix in the 1970s, Inferno comes with a complete development environment including a C compiler. It runs as an independent operating system on computers with different processors such as x86 , Intel XScale , IBM PowerPC , PA-RISC , ARM StrongARM , MIPS and Sun SPARC . In addition, the operation on a host system, such as is Linux (x86), FreeBSD , Solaris or Plan 9 possible experimentally on Android - smartphones . It even runs under Microsoft Internet Explorer with the help of a plug-in . Since the bytecode of the Limbo applications is the same for every architecture, Inferno applications can run anywhere without recompilation.

Inferno has been marketed and further developed by Vita Nuova Inc., York, England , since 2000 . The source code is available with a GPL- like license.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Announcement Hellaphone , Inferno on Android devices

Web links

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