Redox OS Archive
In my last blog post, I introduced the userspace_fexec/userspace_clone features. As the names suggest, they move the inherently complex implementations of fork(3) and execve(2), from the kernel into relibc, giving userspace much more freedom while simplifying the kernel. There has been considerable progress since last post; the features userspace_fexec/userspace_clone, userspace_initfs, and userspace_initfs, have now all been merged! I understood some of those words.
So, as part of RSoC 2022, I have been working on introducing Virtualization on Redox OS. This feature/technology is called Revirt and has wide-ranging consequences for Redox OS as a secure, well-designed, virtualizable and effective operating system. This is a big new addition to Redox OS.
A lot has changed since release 0.6.0! First thing, it is impossible to collect all the changes that happened since December 24, 2020 into one set of release notes, so this will focus on the highlights. It was very important to me that this be a release targeting the foundations of Redox OS. This includes, the bootloader, the filesystem, the package manager, the kernel, the drivers, and much more. The focus was on enabling Redox OS to boot on the widest set of hardware possible. Redox is a Rust-based operating system with a microkernel and a UNIX-like paradigm and an optional GUI. Its lead developer works for System76 as principal engineer.
Now, the reason for not finishing is that I’m basically done! That’s right, GDB has served us reliably for the past few weeks, where we’ve been able to debug our dynamic linker (ld.so) and find problems with shared libraries. We got to the point where the amazing @bjorn3 has managed to run his first rust program compiled on Redox using his rustc cranelift backend! While obviously we would’ve found the bugs without gdb eventually, I’d love to attribute enough credit to it that it warrants being posted here! Redox OS is an operating system written in Rust.
Redox OS 0.5.0 has been released. It has been one year and four days since the last release of Redox OS! In this time, we have been hard at work improving the Redox ecosystem. Much of this work was related to relibc, a new C library written in Rust and maintained by the Redox OS project, and adding new packages to the cookbook. We are proud to report that we have now far exceeded the capabilities of newlib, which we were using as our system C library before. We have added many important libraries and programs, which you can see listed below. Redox OS is a UNIX-like operating system written in Rust, built around a microkernel.
Redox 0.3.3 has been released. Redox is an operating system written in Rust.
This release brings much lower memory usage with ISO - 480 MB instead of 1300 MB. There are also other bug fixes, features, and improvements.
Redox OS, a microkernel OS written in Rust, hast just released version 0.0.6, which includes bug fixes and and update to Rust.
From the project's 2016 in review post:
Today, we have a pretty mature project. It contains many core, usable components. It is already usable, but it is still not mature yet to be used as a replacement for Linux (like BSD is), but we’re slowly getting there.
The kernel was rewritten, a memory allocator was added, rendering libc out of the dependency chain, several applications were added, a file system were added, a window manager and display server was implemented, and so on.
Redox, a Unix-like operating system written in Rust, recently rewrote its kernel:
Since August 13, the kernel is going through a complete rewrite, which makes the kernel space ultra-small (about the size of L4). Everything which can run outside the kernel in practice, will do so.
It is almost complete and will likely be merged in the coming week.
The reasons cited for the rewrite include memory management, concurrent design, SMP support, and 64-bit by default.
Redox is a general purpose operating system and surrounding ecosystem written in pure Rust. Our aim is to provide a fully functioning Linux replacement, without the bad parts.
We have modest compatibility with Linux syscalls, allowing Redox to run many Linux programs without virtualization.
We take inspiration from Plan9, Minix, and BSD. We are trying to generalize various concepts from other systems, to get one unified design. We will speak about this some more in the Design chapter.
Redox runs on real hardware today.
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