Inferno (operating system)

Inferno 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 produced it, were inspired by the literary heritage of Dante Alighieri, particularly the Divine Comedy.

Related Topics:
Operating system - Vita Nuova - Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Styx - Plan 9 - 9P - 9P2000

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Applications are written in the type-safe Limbo programming language, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms, and is executed using Just-in-time compilation techniques

Related Topics:
Type-safe - Limbo

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in a virtual machine.

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Inferno runs directly on native hardware and also as an application providing a Virtual Operating System over other platforms. Applications can be developed and run on all Inferno platforms without modification or recompilation.

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Native ports include:

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• x86
• MIPS
• XScale
• ARM/StrongARM/Thumb
• PowerPC

Hosted or Virtual OS ports include:

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• Plan 9
• Mac OS X
• FreeBSD
• Irix
• Linux
• Solaris
• Unixware
• Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000

Inferno can also be hosted by a plugin to Internet Explorer.

Related Topics:
Plugin - Internet Explorer

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The Inferno 4th edition was released in early 2005 as Free Software under a mixture of Free Software licences (GPL, LGPL, Lucent Public or MIT License, depending on the component). Vita Nuova also offers a conventional non-copyleft Commercial Licence for those who do not wish to license their changes under the default Free Software scheme.

Related Topics:
2005 - Free Software - GPL - LGPL - MIT License - Copyleft

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