Redox OS Planning A Server Version, Stable ABI & Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Redox OS Planning A Server Version, Stable ABI & Better Performance

Redox OS, the open-source Rust-written operating system led by developer Jeremy Soller, has been drafting some exciting plans for the rest of this year and moving into 2024...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-Plans

[andyprough]

Their 0.8 live ISO boots up in a vm without a problem.

Some random notes while checking out the live ISO:
I was able to use the netsurf browser to read Phoronix, but can't sign in to post comments from it. Doesn't seem to have the normal Netsurf settings menu so I'm not sure where to enable the Netsurf version of javascript on this.

It's kind of funny - looks like they've randomly stolen different icons from varioius projects. Mostly Ubuntu but also MacOS. I'm assuming that the artwork will all be dealt with in future versions and that this is just a demo.

I played Doom for a couple of minutes, worked well. It's like a DosBox version.

Redox seems to have a similar file structure to GNU/Linux, and the terminal takes regular commands. This live ISO has free but not top. free -h shows it using 232.9mb of memory - about what I would expect for a starkly minimal window manager. 'ps -A' works.

Doesn't seem to have nano, joe, vi, or emacs, but there is a graphical editor, called 'editor'. It has grep.

It's fairly zippy.

[kiffmet]

Doesn't porting Wayland also mean having to provide DRM and KMS interfaces? For getting actual HW acceleration, that would also require porting the Linux gpu drivers. Good luck with that - the biggest BSD distro still struggles to provide support for non-ancient hardware and Haiku trying to adopt the DRM subsystem has been an ongoing multi-year effort with no end in sight.
The OpenBSD and Genode folks don't count - they're using some sort of "evil" witchcraft.

[Barley9432]

Doesn't porting Wayland also mean having to provide DRM and KMS interfaces? For getting actual HW acceleration, that would also require porting the Linux gpu drivers. Good luck with that - the biggest BSD distro still struggles to provide support for non-ancient hardware and Haiku trying to adopt the DRM subsystem has been an ongoing multi-year effort with no end in sight.
The OpenBSD and Genode folks don't count - they're using some sort of "evil" witchcraft.

Doesn't Nvidia offer their driver stack on FreeBSD? Last I checked it's pretty feature complete

[kpedersen]

Doesn't porting Wayland also mean having to provide DRM and KMS interfaces?

The DRM and KMS interfaces pioneered by Xorg aren't really that complex; especially for non-accelerated framebuffers.

FreeBSD's is in place via linuxkpi abstraction layer and OpenBSD's native implementation is working well. Impressively so given there are few graphics developers (though one of them was on the X.org board).

Solaris also has a decent DRM subsystem in place. I actually recall it being released in Solaris 10 Express before mainstream Linux distros started using it. Unsurprising since they also had a member on the X.org board.

However I am starting to feel that there is more C code in Redox OS than there is Rust code.

[oleid]

For getting actual HW acceleration, that would also require porting the Linux gpu drivers.

The plan to get something quickly is kind of a driver VM

https://www.redox-os.org/news/rsoc-2023-eny-1/

[rmfx]

This project should get more traction.
It’s ultra light, posix inspired but not quite, and Microkernel design.
I think that would be good to see some fresh tech like this have its chance.
Also, it will likely have the Cosmic DE put on top when it’s done, so really an enticing project.

[Quackdoc]

I could see this being quite useful in VMs to run dedicated tasks

[Rallos Zek]

This project should get more traction.
It’s ultra light, posix inspired but not quite, and Microkernel design.

It would if not for the proprietary-lite license. Not wasting my time on any operating system that's not GPLv2 or later. Just asking to be cucked. Might as well use Windows or Mac OS if i want to be a slave.

[kylew77]

It would if not for the proprietary-lite license. Not wasting my time on any operating system that's not GPLv2 or later. Just asking to be cucked. Might as well use Windows or Mac OS if i want to be a slave.

BSD and MIT and Apache licenses are more free than GPL. People are just greedy and exploit it and don't give back, a fundamental flaw in capitalism. But they are more free.