[xiaq]

plan 9 is the earlier effort of re-engineering Unix and runs on hardware. It was meant to replace Unix, but it never did.

With inferno they went the VM route (the dis VM) and built it so that it runs on myriad platforms, from Unix and ActiveX. It still runs on hardware though. The intension was that you can run a network of hosted and native inferno installations, making it easier to adopt. Unfortunately, inferno saw no widespread adoption either.

The underlying filesystem concept is basically the same (the latest version of 9p and Styx are identical), but the programming environment changed a lot (you write limbo to run on dis). Also the user space programs were rewritten and get overhauled a bit. The community never get divergent enough though; inferno people tend to identify themselves as part of the plan 9 community.

[shimon_e]

With most of the inferno team working for Google; I wonder why android hasn't adopted any of inferno's technology.

[pjmlp]

Most likely, because at the beginning the Android team got a few well known Sun/JVM expatriates on their architecture team, like Chet Haase and Romain Guy among others.

Does anyone from Plan 9/Inferno work on the Android team at all?

[xiaq]

Most of the team? I only know that Rob Pike and Russ Cox are Google employers. And I have the impression that they are working mostly on Golang and some distributed infrastructures. Did they employ any other inferno developers?

[p9idf]

About eleven people who once worked on Plan 9 and Inferno are now at Google: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/alumni.html

[myg204]

Thompson, Pressotto, Weinberger, I think (?). Not sure they'd want to work on Infernoogle anyways after so long...

[JIghtuse]

Well, Rob Pike created Go based on Limbo. This language becomes more and more popular. It is not in Android, but Google actively use it (probably in Google Play too).