INFERNO Operating system



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Inferno Operating Systems



Developed in Lucent technologies by Dennis Ritchie.
Replaces a plethora of protocols in a network by a simple unifying file service protocol (styx).
Applications compute their own name spaces and consider all resources as file systems.
Used in Embedded applns and small networked devices. Eg :CATv, PDA etc.


Interesting features of Inferno


Styx open communication protocol.
Concurrent Modular language LIMBO.
Virtual machine and byte code interp-reter with JIT compilers.
Portability and virtualization techniques.
Automatic garbage collection.


Minimal hardware requirements

Can run useful applns as a stand alone with as little as 1 MB of memory.

Portable Applns
Inferno applns are written in type-safe LIMBO whose binary representation is identical for all platforms.

Dynamic adaptability
Depending on the H/W or resource availability,applns may use diff modules
to perform a specific function.


External env of Inferno applns


The glue that connects diff parts of the resource name space together is the styx protocol.
Inferno kernel implements a mount driver which transforms file operations to RPC’s for transport over the network.
On the other side of the conxn, a server unwraps the styx messages and implements them using resources local to it.