This Month in Redox - December 2024

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Tuesday, December 31, 2024

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

Donate to Redox

If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch!

FOSDEM 2025

Jacob Lorentzon (4lDO2) will be presenting his work on Redox Signals in the Microkernels room February 1 at FOSDEM in Brussels. He will also do a short introductory presentation in the Kernel room on February 2.

Funding Opportunity

The NGI Zero Commons Fund and NGI Zero Fediversity Fund each have a call for proposals with a Feb. 1 deadline. If the proposal is successful, it would be to start roughly in June or July (based on our experience) and run for up to 12 months, with an amount up to 50,000 EUR. There must be a “European component”, so a EU-based developer would be an ideal fit, or perhaps a project where the maintainer is EU-based. Here are the links:

Redox is looking for a part-time or short-term developer to help with implementing device drivers, ACPI support, and similar, who would like to join our proposal. You must be knowledgeable in Rust and drivers, and have good reputation in the open source community. We have an existing relationship with NLnet, so we can craft the proposal, based on your skillset and our priorities. Please join us on Matrix and let us know you are interested:

https://matrix.to/#/#redox-join:matrix.org

Dynamic Linking for Redox

Anhad Singh’s Summer of Code project to implement dynamic linking on Redox continues with huge strides. He successfully compiled GCC, GNU Binutils, GNU Make and GNU Bash with dynamic linking. He also implemented dynamic linking support for the Redox triple on GCC.

Dynamic linking is an key part of our Stable ABI strategy, and will help us in our work towards self-hosted development. It will also result in faster compilation time and more space efficient userspace programs. Read his report on the work so far.

Kernel Improvements

Andrey Turkin fixed a regression in the Raspberry Pi 3B support
Zhouqi Jiang improved the OpenSBI support for RISC-V

Driver Improvements

bjorn3 did many improvements and cleanup on video drivers
bjorn3 did many refactorings on the graphics and input subsystems
bjorn3 migrated all video drivers to the redox-scheme library
bjorn3 created the driver-graphics library to unify code
bjorn3 created the graphics-ipc library to unify code
bjorn3 reduced the fbcond daemon and created the fbbootlogd daemon to fix boot deadlocks
bjorn3 removed blocking on any graphics driver
bjorn3 updated the redox-scheme library version
bjorn3 fixed some warnings
Andrey Turkin fixed the BCM2835 driver (Raspberry Pi 3 B+)

VirtIO Improvements

bjorn3 has been working on improvements to the VirtIO-GPU driver.

He has improved the driver to allow Redox guest video size to follow the QEMU window size on the host system.

Currently it only use the window size before boot, post-boot window resizing will be implemented soon.

He fixed a crash on the driver when multiple displays are attached.

He also fixed a memory bug and improved the driver performance.

Here is his tracking issue for the work in progress.

System Improvements

bjorn3 implemented sendfd handling on the redox-scheme library
The contributor rm-dr did a cleanup on RedoxFS
Tim Crawford updated the redox_hwio library to the Rust 2021 edition
Tim Crawford removed the support for non-x86 architectures on PIO from the redox_hwio library

Relibc Improvements

Anhad Singh fixed the dynamic linker
Anhad Singh implemented lazy binding and scopes on the dynamic linker
Anhad Singh implemented dynamic linker configuration through environment variables
Anhad Singh fixed a delay on the Makefile
Anhad Singh improved the debugging
Josh Megnauth fixed a memory overflow
Josh Megnauth fixed the shebang implementation
Josh Megnauth implemented missing structs on netinet.h function group
Josh Megnauth implemented the stdnoreturn.h function group
bitstr0m implemented the cpio.h function group
bitstr0m implemented the glob.h function group
Guillaume Gielly implemented the tar.h function group
Guillaume Gielly implemented the monetary.h function group
Guillaume Gielly implemented the strfmon() function
Darley Barreto implemented the missing functions on the string.h function group
Ron Williams fixed the popen() function and fixed/improved its tests
plimkilde reimplemented the memcpy() function using slices instead of raw pointers, fixed unaligned read/write and added a test
plimkilde added TODOs for the remaining POSIX functions

Networking Improvements

Steffen Butzer fixed some bugs in the implementation of the Address Resolution Protocol
Guillaume Gielly implemented the ifconfig tool for network management on the Redox network stack
Guillaume Gielly improved the ping tool
Guillaume Gielly did a code cleanup and fixed compilation warnings
Josh Megnauth fixed an overflow on MAX_DURATION

Programs

Josh Megnauth fixed and updated Lua
Josh Megnauth ported the LZ4 compressor
Josh Megnauth fixed GLib
Josh Megnauth added a demo for OpenJazz
Amir Ghazanfari improved the process to quit the Sodium text editor
Ron Williams fixed a GNU Bash glob regression

Build System Improvements

Andrey Turkin fixed the recipe operations on the installer after pkgutils removal
Andrey Turkin fixed the configuration for Raspberry Pi 3B emulation on QEMU
Anhad Singh implemented dynamic linking functions on Cookbook
Anhad Singh implement a way to install the runtime dependencies of recipes using the installer
Ribbon fixed the Debian/Ubuntu target on the native_bootstrap.sh script
Ron Williams improved the error messages from the installer

Documentation Improvements

The contributor rm-dr improved the RedoxFS code documentation
Ribbon documented how to download the relibc sources and build it
Ribbon documented how to mount a RedoxFS partition
Jack Lin fixed broken links on the Cookbook README

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

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

Join us on Matrix Chat

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