Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware.

A massive documentation pass has also taken place, fixing various errors and improving and simplifying the writing. More programs have been ported, of course, and various lower-level improvements and fixes, along with a number of other fixes and changes across the operating system.

This year, there have been numerous improvements both to the kernel’s correctness, as well as raw performance. The signal and TLB shootdown MRs have significantly improved kernel memory integrity and possibly eliminated many hard-to-debug and nontrivial heisenbugs. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of work to be done optimizing and fixing bugs in relibc, in order to improve compatibility with ported applications, and most importantly of all, getting closer to a self-hosted Redox.

↫ Jacob Lorentzon (4lDO2)

I love how much of the focus for Redox seems to be on the lower levels of the operating system, because it’s something many projects tend to kind of forget to highlight, to spend more time on new icons or whatever. These in-depth Redox articles are always informative, and have me very excited about Redox’ future.

Obviously, Redox is on the list of operating systems I need to write a proper article about. I’m not sure if there’s enough for a full review or if it’ll be more of a short look – we’ll see when we get there.