Other websites
- Inferno Archived 2012-10-13 at the Wayback Machine at vitanuova.com
Inferno is a distributed operating system made by Bell Labs and Vita Nuova Holdings based on ideas and technology from Plan 9 from Bell Labs. The three main principles behind Inferno's design are:
- Resources as files: all resources are represented as files within a hierarchical file system
- Namespaces: 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
- Standard communication protocol: a standard protocol 9P is used to access all resources, both local and remote
As a distributed operating system (i.e. an operating system working across and connecting multiple machines and devices together), Inferno is also designed to be able to operated on a variety of computer architectures. It can also be operated on top of other operating systems, such as Unix, Microsoft Windows, or Google's Android operating system. In order to make Inferno applications as portable to other computer architectures as the Inferno operating system, Inferno applications are written in a programing language called Limbo and run inside Inferno's Dis virtual machine.
