

The Inferno Operating System (1997) - vezzy-fnord
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/bltj.html

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vital101
Back in grad school we used the Inferno OS as a learning tool. I don't
remember too much about it, but I do remember using Limbo (precursor to
Golang) and liking it quite a lot. When Go came out it was really easy to pick
up due to my time mucking around Inferno using Limbo.

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nsajko
Which school was it?

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vital101
Central Michigan University

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analognoise
Are the course notes online? I'm an EE by degree but I've been getting more
interested in the programming side of the house and I'm looking for a
"teaching os".

The other option is the perennial favorite, Minix, but I've realized about
computing is that there are a lot of thoughts on how to do things correctly
and seeing only one way may make you blind.

As an aside, it looks like we've hugged the site to death.

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gh02t
If you want to learn the kernel side, Xv6 is made specifically for a course
series at MIT and has a ton of material on how it is designed. It's meant to
be super simple for tinkering.

[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html)

If you're really looking for a more complete OS for perusing the source, I'd
probably say OpenBSD. They emphasize clean implementation and documentation,
which makes it a good learning tool as well.

Inferno and the other Plan9 family members maybe aren't the best choices IMO.
I haven't done a super deep dive, but my impression is that the communities
around them are starved for labor and you might not find things as
approachable. There's a lot there to learn of course, but you might have more
issues.

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vezzy-fnord
The communities are niche, but on the other hand Plan 9's internal code style,
organization and the liberal use of a few small grand abstractions actually
make it easier to study for hobbyists and researchers alike compared to a full
modern Unix with all of its intrinsic architectural complexity and real-world
cruft (not that OpenBSD isn't one of the best ones in avoiding this).

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rwmj
What was the exact relationship between Inferno and Plan 9? The documentation
said it was "influenced by". Did it share code? Was Limbo used anywhere in
Plan 9 (which I assume was written in C)?

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vezzy-fnord
They're two independent projects and architecturally quite different (what
with the Dis VM being king in Inferno), even though the 9P protocol and much
of the Plan 9 userland was reused.

Plan 9 never used Limbo natively from what I know. Only C and Alef. Limbo was
ported to it, however.

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smellf
Page appears down, here's the Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CSMUmBf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CSMUmBfF9r0J:www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/bltj.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

