This Month in Redox - October 2024

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Thursday, October 31, 2024

Redox OS is a Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. October was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news.

Support Redox - Merch Sale

A very early Season’s Greetings! Redox Merch is on sale! 15% off everything at our Merch store when you use the discount code “REDOX2025” during checkout. T-Shirts, Hoodies and Mugs, all with the Redox logo.

Look for the field labelled “Promo Code”, enter REDOX2025, and press “Apply”. The discount will show up in the “Order Summary”.

Order now to be sure they arrive by the holidays. Certain product size/color combinations may take longer to arrive.

The discount comes from the Redox portion of your purchase, so if you are only buying one item, please consider not using the discount code.

Or donate to help support the Redox team.

Redox Architecture

Announcing the Redox OS/RFCs room on Redox Matrix. The RFCs room is for discussion about architectural concepts and proposed new features.

If you have expertise in capability-based security, sandboxing, microkernel performance or other architectural concepts that have been implemented in other major operating systems, we would love for you to contribute to our RFC process.

If the above link does not work for you, please ask for an invitation to the Redox Matrix space.

Redox runs on RISC-V!!

RISC-V is now a supported target for Redox!

Andrey Turkin has done extensive work on RISC-V support in the kernel, toolchain and elsewhere. Thanks very much Andrey for the excellent work!

Jeremy Soller has incorporated RISC-V support into the toolchain and build process, has begun some refactoring of the kernel and device drivers to better handle all the supported architectures, and has gotten the Orbital Desktop working when running in QEMU.

Raspberry Pi 4 Is Booting!!

Jeremy Soller got the Raspberry Pi 4 board to show the Orbital login screen. We still need to work on USB support to make it fully usable.

COSMIC Store

The COSMIC Store was ported!

We updated our configuration files to be compliant with the FreeDesktop standards. This allows the COSMIC Store to show and install our packages.

Kernel Improvements

4lDO2 fixed the profiler
Ron Williams fixed a regression in the serial console login
James Francis added a small optimization to how the vector containing open files is resized

Driver Improvements

Andrey Turkin sent initial code for RISC-V support on drivers
Kamil Koczurek updated the ACPI driver to serialize symbols to RON
Kamil Koczurek updated the ACPI driver to use the new redox_scheme library

RedoxFS Improvements

Andrey Turkin fixed a troublesome bug on the FUSE backend, which was causing issues with both the build and CI. Thanks for finding this Andrey!

Relibc Improvements

plimkilde refactored the strcasecmp and strncasecmp functions with iterators
plimkilde documented more functions
Ron Williams fixed detection of errors during the cbindgen header building
Ron Williams improved the tests to make them easier to run on Redox

ARM64 Improvements

Jeremy Soller enabled the ARM64 packages on the build server!!

RISC-V Improvements

Andrey Turkin sent the first batch of patches to implement the riscv64gc-unknown-redox triple on the Rust compiler fork of Redox
Andrey Turkin implemented the RISC-V target on the build system
Andrey Turkin added RISC-V code on most user-space components
Jeremy Soller enabled the RISC-V toolchain
Jeremy Soller enabled RISC-V packages on the build server

Package Improvements

We finally enabled the pkgar package format by default and dropped the tar.gz packages.

If you want to know all features of the pkgar package format please read the pkgar introduction news post.

Programs and Porting

LekKit ported the RVVM RISC-V emulator to Redox. Thanks LekKit!
bitstr0m ported LuaJIT
Josh Megnauth ported the QuakeSpasm engine
Josh Megnauth ported the OpenTyrian game
Josh Megnauth ported the GLEW library

Build System Improvements

4lDO2 modernized the installer code and implemented support for local binary packages

CI Improvements

Jeremy Soller fixed the pre-built packages installation not working after the pkgar transition
Andrey Turkin packaged all toolchains on the Docker image

From Nothing To Hello World

Ribbon wrote a page to explain the most quick way to test Redox and run a “Hello World” program, have a look at From Nothing To Hello World in the Redox Book.

Documentation Improvements

Ribbon moved the items of the HARDWARE.md document to status tables that are much more easy to maintain (thanks for the suggestion contributor J. Craft)
Ribbon explained why we need hardware reports

Join us on Matrix Chat

If you want to contribute, give feedback or just listen in to the conversation, join us on Matrix Chat.

Discussion

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