http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ http://www.resc.rdg.ac.

uk/twiki/bin/view/Resc/InfernoTutorial A compact operating system for building cross-platform distributed systems Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed a nd networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique featur es, 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 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 Linux MacOS X FreeBSD Solaris Plan 9 Supported Architectures Intel x86 (386 & higher) Intel XScale IBM PowerPC ARM StrongARM (ARM & Thumb) Sun SPARC Inferno also runs as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4 and higher. Eac h Inferno system presents an identical environment to the applications, irrespective of the underlying host O S 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 pr ogramming 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. Portable Code Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent code for the Dis Virtual Mac hine, with a compact representation. Dis can be interpreted directly (saving space), or compiled on t he 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 ar e easy to implement. Transparent Resources

Inferno offers complete transparency of resources and data using a simple but po werful 'namespace' system. By representing resources as files and having one standard communication protoco l 9P (Styx) r esources 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 applica tions 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 sta ndard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system lev el. 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 envir onment, providing all the tools necessary for creating, testing and debugging the applications that run wi thin 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... FeaturesCompact Runs on devices with as little as 1MB of RAM Complete Development Environment Including Acme IDE, compilers, shell, UNIX like commands & graphical debugger Limbo An advanced modular, safe, concurrent programming language with C like syntax. Library Modules Limbo modules for networking, graphics (including GUI toolkit), security and mor e... Dis Virtual Machine Virtual machine providing target system independence and compact code. JIT Compilation Improves application performance by compiling object code on the fly (Just In Ti me). Namespaces Powerful resource representation using a single communication protocol, 9P. Impo rt and export resources completely transparently.

Full Source Code Full source code for the whole system and applications, subject to licence terms And more... Online manual pages Full unicode support Dynamic modules Advanced GUI toolkit Javascript 1.1 web browser C cross compiler suite Remote Debugging Games, Demos & Utilities demonstration of Inferno running on an Android phone. Sandia National Labs has a dapted the Inferno operating system to act as a more phone-oriented OS, allowing us to make calls, send and receive SMS, and use the phone data network. The Hellaphone runs Inferno directly on top of the basic Linux layer provided by Android. We do not even allow the Java system to start. Instead, emu draws directly to the Linux framebu ffer (thanks, Andrey, for the initial code!) and treats the touchscreen like a one-button mouse. Because the J ava environment doesn t start, it only takes about 10 seconds to go from power off to a fully-booted Inf erno environment.