This Week in Redox 14

By Ticki on Saturday, April 30, 2016

This is the 14th 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, visit our Github page.

Whew, what a long week… ;P

(edited by Ticki)

PSA

If you have any questions, ideas, or are curious about Redox, we recommend joining #redox on irc.mozilla.org or our Discourse forum!

What’s new in Redox?

@jackpot51 has replaced the old filesystem with a much faster and better one, supporting memory caching, complete write support, persistent (on-disk) file creation, and efficient (O(1)) renaming. This will act as a temporary replacement for the WIP ZFS support.
@ticki has added a new syscall, SYS_SUPERVISE with the purpose of allowing processes to control, sandbox, and supervise their child processes. This acts as a simpler, and yet more expressive, replacement for ptrace. In addition to this new syscall, a new flag to SYS_CLONE was added, together with a spawn_supervised method on Command.
@jackpot51 has made std:net (almost) on par with the upstream libstd.
@ticki has completed ralloc, the efficient memory allocator of Redox. While it is complete, not all bugs are fixed yet. Supports metacircular reallocation, block queue, efficient inplace reallocation, cache efficient lookups, and memory management debugging.
@ticki has improved the infrastructure slightly, by creating a new handy a library for making Mattermost/Slack bots, along with a Rust Playground bot built on it (à la #rust’s playbot) and a few other bots.
@jackpot51 has moved the filesystem into userspace!
@ticki has created a new Rust-based build system, cake, which will replace Make for building Redox in the near future.
@nounoursheureux has added a better kernel logging system. This will soon be generalized to userspace logs as well.
@wesleywiser has added multiple buffers for Sodium.
@jackpot51 is working on DHCP/DNS support.
@nounoursheureux has added process-local environment variables.
@stratact has added menu support to OrbTK.
@jackpot51 added a simple initial implementation of wget.
@ticki has added dem, a small commandline-based Democracy clone, to games-for-redox for fun.
The kernel now supports basic UDP networking.
@nounoursheureux has added export to Ion.
@mmstick has improved the implementation of cat.
@jackpot51 and @ticki have written manpages for most of the tools. The simple docgen tool is used for the generation of documentation, which is placed in /refs.
… and many small things.

Pictures

Redox running on Thinkpad T-420:

Redox running on ASUS eeePC 900:

Redox running on Panasonic Toughbook CF-18:

Handy links

What’s next?

Use ralloc by default.
Switch to Cake.
Writable ZFS.
Extend the book.

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.

craftytrickster 🎂
dalance 🎂
nilset 🎂
tpitale 🎂
wesleywiser 🎂

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