This Week in Redox 11

By Ticki on Tuesday, February 16, 2016

This is the 11th post of a series of blog posts tracking the development and progress of Redox, the Rust operating system. If you want to know more about Redox in general, then visit our Github page.

You might wonder why no update on the progress of Redox OS has appeared over the last couple of weeks. The reason is that we all have been busy with … being lazy. Nah, just kidding. Actually, we have done a lot of stuff on Redox.

(edited by Ticki)

PSA

If you have questions, ideas, or are curious about Redox, you are recommended to join #redox on irc.mozilla.org, and chat with us!

What’s new in Redox?

• @jackpot51 has added full blown x86_64 support. Yay!

• @eghiorzi has ported his program, ‘RUSThello’, to Redox. ‘RUSThello’ is an highly concurrent AI for Reversi (also known as Othello). This demonstrates Redox’s multithreading abilities.

• @ticki has started binutils. xxd, hexdump, and strings are completed.

• Thanks to @roxxik has made the kernel run in flat real mode, for i386. This means we are now a little closer to adding x86_64 support.

• @jackpot51 has fixed several bugs in kernel space.

• We are now a few steps farther on the road to full blown libstd compatibility. New things ported includes std::process, which is still WIP, (@jackpot51) HashMap (@ticki), get_current_dir() (@k0pernicus), fs::canonicalize (@jackpot51), and much more.

• @alicemaz has written a wc (behaving like GNU coreutils' wc) utility.

• @ticki has rewritten all the Redox coreutils, for faster and more correct code.

• Sodium (text editor) and the Redox launcher (launcher.bin), Orbclient (display client) now runs on Linux! Thanks to the awesomness of @jackpot51 and @stratact. orbclient uses SDL2 as backend on Linux.

• @skylerberg has done several changes to Ion (the shell). These includes: a PEG-based parser, directory stacks (popd, pushd, dirs), fork and job control, glob expansion, cd -, and much more!

• @jackpot51 has completely rewritten Orbital. Orbital now runs entirely in userspace, and can be started via a normal executable file, without any assistance from kernel space.

• Thanks to @jackpot51, we now got proper schemes in userspace!

• @gmorenz has improved the multi-cursor feature of Sodium.

• @jackpot51 has written a very minimal init system.

• And lots of small changes.

What does it look like?

Someone from the future send it to me. For anyone wondering this is definitely not fake.

This actually happened (believe it or not), while I was hacking on the interrupt handler for x86_64.

OrbTK is a widget toolkit for Orbital, ala GTK.

What’s next?

• Port SDL2
• Games on Redox
• x86_64

New contributors

Since the list of contributors are growing too fast, we’ll now only list the new contributors. This might change in the future.

Sorted in alphabetical order.

• alicemaz 🎂
• gmorenz 🎂
• grappigpanda 🎂
• llambda 🎂
• roxxik 🎂

Welcome guys and gals!

If I missed something, be free to contact me (Ticki) or send a PR to Redox website.