This Month in Redox - October 2024

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on

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.

Orbital on RISC-V

Terminal on RISC-V

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.

COSMIC Store running on Redox

Kernel Improvements

Driver Improvements

RedoxFS Improvements

Relibc Improvements

ARM64 Improvements

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

RISC-V Improvements

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

Build System Improvements

CI Improvements

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

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

Here are some links to discussion about this news post: