Inferno (Operating System)

Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services. It was based on the experience of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability. Inferno applications are portable across a broad mix of hardware, networks, and environments. It defines a virtual machine, known as Dis, that can be implemented on any real machine, provides Limbo, a type-safe language that is compiled to portable byte code, and, more significantly, it includes a virtual operating system that supplies the same interfaces whether Inferno runs natively on hardware or is hosted as an application on other systems. A communications protocol called Styx is applied uniformly to access both local and remote resources, which applications use by calling standard file operations, open, read, write, and close. As of the fourth edition of Inferno, Styx is identical to Plan 9's newerversion of its hallmark 9P protocol, 9P2000.