5 ms·

I've worked professionally with Inferno and know the inventor and current maintainer. It's a good system and is used in a couple of commercial systems I know o

I've worked professionally with Inferno and know the inventor and current maintainer. It's a good system and is used in a couple of commercial systems I know of. It is also ported to IBM's Blue Gene and used in the research programme there.

saganus 10y ago
Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of commercial systems you used this for? and what was the role of Inferno in it? I've been really interested in playing with it since my college years, but every time I got to poke around I felt like it wouldn't be (in my very uneducated opinion) fit for something in production. However the idea of the OS is very appealing to me, so I would love to hear more on how does this fare in the real world and what would be a compelling use case. Thanks!
- SixSigma 10y ago
  My friend used it as the OS for an acoustic levitator built in the US and sold to a Japanese Company - he got sensible hardware control and a GUI toolkit all in the same OS. I worked for a startup trying to build a phone - I'm NDA on that so can't say much about it except we incorporated Sql lite into it easily enough - the beauty of an OS in C, tack on a 9P interface and you don't need drivers or headers in your Limbo code. In fact that's the greatest takeaway from Plan9 and Inferno for me. Add 9p to your server and you never need native drivers again - it's a bit like REST. Once you can mount 9P you compose all sorts of stuff. The canonical example is TCP. If I can mount your /net/tcp on my file system I can use your network stack. Even if I am only connected to you with a serial cable. And it is on a per process basis so I can have two shell windows importing two network stacks from different remote machines and use two networks and they are separate.
  - saganus 10y ago
    That does sound very interesting. I'll definitely have to take a look again with different eyes. Thanks for the details!
  - jff 10y ago
    I'd be interested in talking about the phone project in more detail... I'll even sign an NDA if the startup still exists, or just generally talk about Inferno. We have probably communicated on the Inferno list in the past, actually, but since neither of us have contact info in our profiles you can reach me at this disposable address for the initial contact: alt.za-2othz2qa@yopmail.com

saganus 10y ago

Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of commercial systems you used this for? and what was the role of Inferno in it? I've been really interested in playing with it since my college years, but every time I got to poke around I felt like it wouldn't be (in my very uneducated opinion) fit for something in production. However the idea of the OS is very appealing to me, so I would love to hear more on how does this fare in the real world and what would be a compelling use case. Thanks!

SixSigma 10y ago
My friend used it as the OS for an acoustic levitator built in the US and sold to a Japanese Company - he got sensible hardware control and a GUI toolkit all in the same OS. I worked for a startup trying to build a phone - I'm NDA on that so can't say much about it except we incorporated Sql lite into it easily enough - the beauty of an OS in C, tack on a 9P interface and you don't need drivers or headers in your Limbo code. In fact that's the greatest takeaway from Plan9 and Inferno for me. Add 9p to your server and you never need native drivers again - it's a bit like REST. Once you can mount 9P you compose all sorts of stuff. The canonical example is TCP. If I can mount your /net/tcp on my file system I can use your network stack. Even if I am only connected to you with a serial cable. And it is on a per process basis so I can have two shell windows importing two network stacks from different remote machines and use two networks and they are separate.
- saganus 10y ago
  That does sound very interesting. I'll definitely have to take a look again with different eyes. Thanks for the details!
- jff 10y ago
  I'd be interested in talking about the phone project in more detail... I'll even sign an NDA if the startup still exists, or just generally talk about Inferno. We have probably communicated on the Inferno list in the past, actually, but since neither of us have contact info in our profiles you can reach me at this disposable address for the initial contact: alt.za-2othz2qa@yopmail.com