Another month, another Redox progress report. January turned out to be a big month for the Rust-based general purpose operating system, as they’ve cargo and rustc working on Redox.

Cargo and rustc are now working on Redox! Thanks to Anhad Singh and his southern-hemisphere Redox Summer of Code project, we are now able to compile your favorite Rust CLI and TUI programs on Redox. Compilers are often one of the most challenging things for a new operating system to support, because of the intensive and somewhat scattershot use of resources.

↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams

That’s not all for January, though. An initial capability-based security infrastructure has been implemented for granular permissions, SSH support has been improved and now works properly for remoting into Redox sessions, and USB input latency has been massively reduced. You can now also add, remove, and change boot parameters in a new text editing environment in the bootloader, and the login manager now has power and keyboard layout menus. January also saw the first commit made entirely from within Redox, which is pretty neat.

Of course, there’s much more, as well as the usual slew of kernel, relibc, and application bugfixes and small changes.

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.

An exciting tidbit of news from Redox, the Rust-based operating system. Its founder and lead developer Jeremy Soller has merged the first changes for a modesetting driver for Intel graphics.

After a few nights of reading through thousands of pages of PRMs I have finally implemented a modesetting driver for Intel HD graphics on Redox OS. There is much more to do, but there is now a clear path to native hardware accelerated graphics!

↫ Jeremy Soller

Of course, all the usual disclaimers apply, but it’s an important first step, and once again underlines that Redox is turning into a very solid platform that might just be on the cusp of becoming something we can use every day.

Redox keeps improving every month, and this past one is certainly a banger. The big news this past month is that Servo, the browser engine written in Rust, has been ported to Redox. It’s extremely spartan at the moment, and crashes when a second website is loaded, but it’s a promising start. It also just makes sense to have the premier Rust browser engine running on the premier Rust operating system. Htop and bottom have been ported to Redox for much improved system monitoring, and they’re joined by a port of GoAccess.

The version of Rust has been updated which fixed some issues, and keyboard layout configuration has been greatly improved. Instead of a few hardcoded layouts, they can now be configured dynamically for users of PS/2 keyboards, with USB keyboards receiving this functionality soon as well. There’s more, of course, as well as the usual slew of low-level changes and improvements to drivers, the kernel relibc, and more.