Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers. ARM64 now has dynamic linking support, POSIX compliance has been improved, and countless other improvements. Of course, there’s also the usual massive list of bug fixes and minor changes to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and so on.
I genuinely wish the Redox project another successful year. The team seems to have its head screwed on right, and is making considerable progress basically every month. I don’t know what the end goal is, but the way things are looking right now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come preinstalled on system76 laptops somewhere over the coming five years.
I made this comment in another article but I see Redox as possibly a more successful attempt at what GNU set out to do originally. By “more successful”, I do not mean popularity (though that would be great). I mean the philosophical goal of a complete and 100% Free Software general-purpose UNIX-like operating system along with the choice of a micro-kernel design.
Redox is attempting to create not just a kernel but the C library, COW filesystem, audio sub-system, and display server. So many parts of the operating system that GNU never got around to. Ironically, the bits Redox is not writing themselves are the core utilities (using UUtils) and compiler (using Rust) which were the core elements of the early GNU project. Still, Redox is going to be a soup-to-nuts complete operating system from scratch (all in Rust). Popularity is not guaranteed but it is already staggering what they have accomplished in a short-time. The scope of their ambition is compelling.
Since Relibc runs on Linux, it would be interesting to create a Redox Linux distro that featured the same software stack as RedoxOS where everything was the same but the kernel and drivers. That would create a great testbed for the Redox stack and allow more direct comparison between the two kernels in terms of performance, efficiency, stability, and compatibility.
Redox OS on a RISC-V machine is like a total reboot of the technology stack that has dominated the past 40-50 years.