Inferno is a distributed operating system originally developed by Bell Labs, but now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova as free software. Applications written in Limbo, Inferno’s concurrent programming language, are compiled to its portable virtual machine code (Dis) to run anywhere on the network in a portable environment provided by Inferno.The difference is that the environment looks and operates like a complete operating system.

Inferno represents services and resources in a file-like name hierarchy. Programs access them only using the file operations open, read/write and close. “Files” are not just stored data, but represent devices, network and protocol interfaces, dynamic data sources, and services. This approach unifies and provides basic naming, structuring, and access control mechanisms for all system resources. A single file service protocol (same as Plan 9’s 9P) enables all of these resources to be imported or exported over the network in a uniform manner, regardless of location. An application simply attaches the resources it needs to its own per-process name hierarchy (“namespace”).

Inferno is available on various ARM, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 platforms”native“, or “hosted” under existing operating systems (including AIX, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, MacOS X, Plan 9, and Solaris), also on a variety of processor types.

The repository includes the source code of the base application, Inferno itself(hosted and native), all supporting software, including native compiler suites, base executables, and support files.