This Month in Redox - January 2025

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Friday, January 31, 2025

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

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Dynamic Linking

Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has implemented dynamic linking as the default build method for many recipes, and all new porting can use dynamic linking with relatively little effort.

This is a huge step forward for Redox, because relibc can now become a stable ABI. And having a stable ABI is one of the prerequisites for Redox to reach “Release 1.0”.

Congratulations and many thanks Anhad!

LOVE on Redox

Jeremy Soller ported the LOVE game engine to Redox, to achieve this he did the following tasks:

Ported the libmodplug, libtheora, and openal-soft libraries
Fixed bugs and implemented some functions in relibc

You can see the Balatro game running on Redox below:

Toolchain Upgrade

The Rust compiler version was updated from 1.80 to 1.86 to fix many programs.

Kernel Improvements

Anhad Singh fixed the chunk size of the ITimer scheme

System Improvements

Ron Williams updated the ptyd daemon to use the latest version of the redox-scheme library
Anhad Singh implemented dynamic linking support on the liborbital library

Relibc Improvements

Anhad Singh improved the dynamic linker performance up to 1000%
Anhad Singh fixed undefined behavior on the error handling
Anhad Singh fixed the dynamic linker’s copy relocations
Anhad Singh implemented DT_RELR on the dynamic linker
Anhad Singh fixed the dynamic linker multi-threading
Bendeguz Pisch implemented the sigsetjmp function
Bendeguz Pisch implemented the siglongjmp function
Guillaume Gielly implemented the langinfo.h function group
Guillaume Gielly refactored the strftime() function to use the langinfo constants
Darley Barreto implemented the tzset function
Darley Barreto implemented timezone awareness
Josh Megnauth implemented the support for arguments on shebangs
Jeremy Soller implemented the setlinebuf() function
Ron Williams fixed the interrupt handling of the nanosleep and sleep functions
Ron Williams fixed the alarm function to match the POSIX specification
plimkilde documented the dirent.h and arpa/inet.h function groups
plimkilde implemented a way to test deprecated functions

Networking Improvements

Guillaume Gielly fixed the DHCP server identifier
Guillaume Gielly fixed the time calculation of the ping tool

Programs

Jeremy Soller ported the LOVE game engine
Jeremy Soller ported the libmodplug library
Jeremy Soller ported the libtheora library
Jeremy Soller ported the openal-soft library
Josh Megnauth improved the portability of GNU programs
Josh Megnauth simplified the GNU Make recipe configuration
Josh Megnauth partially ported the Boost library
Anhad Singh ported the patchelf tool
Anhad Singh updated more recipes to support dynamic linking

Build System Improvements

Anhad Singh implemented the support for dynamic linking on Cookbook
Anhad Singh implemented a switch to enable/disable static linking
Anhad Singh implemented a recipe data type (shared-deps) for dynamically linked libraries
Ron Williams fixed a toolchain desynchronization
Daniel Axtens fixed the bootstrapping on Ubuntu 24.04
Anhad Singh updated the Redoxer version

Documentation Improvements

Ron Williams implemented a test for unused pages on the Redox book
Ron Williams improved the chat documentation
Ribbon improved the README of most system components to include guidance on how to contribute and do Redox development, to encourage people to read and follow the method in the Redox book
Anhad Singh documented the recipe dynamic linking configuration
Andrew Lygin fixed typos on the book

How To Test The Changes

To test the changes of this month download the server or desktop variants of the daily images.

(Use the server variant for a terminal interface and the desktop variant for a graphical interface, if the desktop variant doesn’t work use the server variant)

If you want to test in a virtual machine use the “harddrive” images
If you want to test on real hardware use the “livedisk” images

Read the following pages to learn how to use the images in a virtual machine or real hardware:

Sometimes the daily images are outdated and you need to build Redox from source. For instructions on how to do this, read the Building Redox page.

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Discussion

Here are some links to discussion about this news post: