Jeremy Soller (), founder of the operating system , written in Rust, discusses the successful use of Redox on the System76 Galaga Pro laptop (Jeremy Soller works at System76). The fully functional components include the keyboard, touchpad, storage (NVMe), and Ethernet.
Experiments with Redox on the laptop have already improved driver performance, added HiDPI support in some applications, and created new components like pkgar, which simplifies the installation of Redox from Live images. Current efforts focus on achieving system self-assembly (building Redox from a Redox-based environment). In a few months, Soller plans to transition to full-time work on Redox from a Redox-based environment after implementing some enhancements related to the rustc compiler.
The microkernel concept used in Redox simplifies driver development, as it allows recompiling and restarting the subsystem that operates the drivers without stopping the system. It is expected that development in a Redox-based environment will enhance the efficiency of porting programs and addressing hardware support issues. For instance, there are plans to finalize the USB stack and add graphic drivers.
It is worth noting that the operating system evolves in accordance with Unix philosophy and borrows some ideas from SeL4, Minix, and Plan 9. Redox employs a microkernel concept, where only inter-process communication and resource management are handled at the kernel level, while all other functionality is offloaded to libraries that can be used by both the kernel and user applications. All drivers run in user space within isolated sandbox environments. To ensure compatibility with existing applications, a special POSIX layer is provided, enabling many programs to run without porting.
The system applies the principle of 'everything is a URL'. For example, the URL 'log://' can be used for logging, 'bus://' for process interaction, 'tcp://' for network interaction, etc. Modules that can be implemented as drivers, kernel extensions, and user applications can register their URL handlers; for example, a module for accessing input/output ports can be written and bound to the URL 'port_io://', allowing access to port 60 via the URL 'port_io://60'. Project Developments under the MIT open license.
User environment in Redox based on its own graphical shell (not to be confused with shell , which uses Qt and Wayland) and the toolkit , providing an API similar to Flutter, React, and Redux. The web browser used is The project also develops its own , a set of standard utilities (binutils, coreutils, netutils, extrautils), the command shell , the standard C library , a vim-like text editor , a network stack, and the filesystem , developed based on ideas from ZFS (a modular version of ZFS in Rust). Configuration is specified in the .
Source: opennet.ru
