24-09-2013, 04:51 PM
A Seminar Report On Inferno Os
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ABSTRACT
Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services .The
name of the operating system and of its associated programs, as well as of the company
Vita Nuova Holding that produces it, were inspired by the litrary works of Dante
Alighieri, particularly the Divine Comedy. Inferno runs in hosted mode under several
different operating systems or natively on a range of hardware architectures. In each
configuration the operating system presents the same standard interfaces to its
applications. A communications protocol called Styx is applied uniformly to access both
local and remote resources. Applications are written in the type-safe Limbo
programming language, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms.
INTRODUCTION
Inferno is intended to be used in a variety of network environments, for example
those supporting advanced telephones, hand-held devices, TV set-top boxes attached to
cable or satellite systems, and inexpensive Internet computers, but also in conjunction
with traditional computing systems.
The most visible new environments involve cable television, direct satellite
broadcast, the Internet, and other networks. As the entertainment, telecommunications,
and computing industries converge and interconnect, a variety of public data networks are
emerging, each potentially as useful and profitable as the telephone system. Unlike the
telephone system, which started with standard terminals and signaling, these networks are
developing in a world of diverse terminals, network hardware, and protocols. Only a well-
designed, economical operating system can insulate the various providers of content and
services from the equally varied transport and presentation platforms. Inferno is a network
operating system for this new world.
Namespaces
The second key principle of Inferno is the computable namespace, by which an
application builds a unique private view of the resources and services it needs to access.
Each set of resources is represented as a hierarchy of files and is accessible via the
standard file access operations. The various resources and services being used by a
process are combined into a single rooted hierarchy of file names, called a namespace. The
resources accessible within an individual namespace can be located on a single client or
on multiple servers throughout the network.
One of the main advantages of this namespace system is that an application may use
resources completely transparently. Once the dynamic files present by the resource are
mounted within the namespace visible to application, it may access them without knowing
if the resource is local or remote.
INFERNO INTERFACES
The role of the Inferno system is to create several standard interfaces for its applications:
Applications use various resources internal to the system, such as a consistent
virtual machine that runs the application programs, together with library modules that
perform services as simple as string manipulation through more sophisticated graphics
services for dealing with text, pictures, higher-level toolkits, and video.
Applications exist in an external environment containing resources such as data
files that can be read and manipulated, together with objects that are named and
manipulated like files but are more active. Devices (for example a hand-held remote
control, an MPEG decoder or a network interface) present themselves to the application as
files.
Standard protocols exist for communication within and between separate machines
running Inferno, so that applications can cooperate.
At the same time, Inferno uses interfaces supplied by an existing environment,
either bare hardware or standard operating systems and protocols.
Most typically, an Inferno-based service would consist of many relatively cheap
terminals running Inferno as a native system, and a smaller number of large machines
running Inferno as a hosted system. On these server machines Inferno might interface to
databases, transaction systems, existing OA&M facilities, and other resources provided
under the native operating system.