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Inferno® is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique features, Inferno puts an unrivalled set of tools into your hands. You can fetch it now as Free Software, on similar terms to Linux or xBSD

Cross-Platform Portability Linux

MacOS X FreeBSD Solaris Plan 9

Inferno can run as a user application on top of an existing operating system or

as a stand alone operating system. Most of the popular operating systems

and processor architectures are supported: Host Operating Systems

Windows NT/2000/XP Irix

Inferno also runs as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4 and higher. Each Inferno system presents an identical environment to the applications, irrespective of the underlying host OS or architecture, allowing the developer to work with a truly homogeneous environment across multiple different platforms.

Portable Applications Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.

Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent code for the Dis® Virtual Machine, with a compact representation. Dis can be interpreted directly (saving space), or compiled on the fly for a given target processor (saving time). The choice can be made at run-time, per module. The Dis architecture was carefully designed to make on-the-fly code generation straightforward. Its instructions are easy to implement.Portable CodeTransparent Resources Inferno offers complete transparency of resources and data using a simple but powerful 'namespace' system. By representing resources as files and having one standard communication protocol — 9P (Styx®) — resources such as data stores, services and external devices can easily be shared between Inferno systems. A resource interface may be imported to the local system and used by the applications without them knowing, or needing to know, whether it is local or remote.

Security

High level security is an important part of the Inferno system. By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:

IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms

MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms

A Complete Solution

Inferno is not only an operating system, it is also a complete development environment, providing all the tools necessary for creating, testing and debugging the applications that run within it.

Acme IDE: includes editor, shell, advanced pattern matching tools & more

Fast Compiler: with full syntax and compile time type checking

Graphical Debugger: with full stack trace for currently executing threads

Powerful Shell: with sophisticated scripting capabilities

UNIX like commands: including bind, grep, gzip, mount, ps, tar, yacc...

Licence Terms Inferno 4th Edition is available under a `dual licence' scheme. You can choose between two licence structures: The Free Software Scheme Inferno available as `Free Software' (in the sense of the Free Software Foundation). Under this scheme, each subcomponent of the system is licensed under a Free Software licence that seemed (to us) appropriate for that subcomponent. The licences are all existing Free Software licences, not one of our own, including GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), MIT-template, Lucent Public License 1.02, and FreeType. You can use Inferno under this scheme if the use you make of any given component will be compatible with its Free Software licence. This scheme replaces our own `Liberal Source Licence' used for some earlier distributions.

Commercial Developer Licence If the result of your work using Inferno will not or cannot be made Free Software, you can obtain the system under a more conventional commercial software licence. This usually requires payment of a licence fee, but subsequent use (subject to the licence) is royalty free. [text] [pdf] Which licence should I choose? If you distribute Inferno with changes or additions to sections of Inferno that are under GPL or LGPL, and you will distribute (or otherwise make available) the source code to those changes or additions, you can choose the Free Software Scheme, otherwise choose the Commercial Developer Licence.