This Month in Redox - August 2026

40 points by theelx a day ago on lobsters | 6 comments

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Monday, August 31, 2026

Redox OS is a complete Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. August was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news.

Sorry for the delayed report, a combination of busy development, time off, conference attendance, other work, and various random factors got in the way.

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More Boot Fixes

Wildan Mubarok improved UEFI compatibility, which allowed the MSI Modern 14 C7M laptop to boot!

ARM64 Multi-core Support

lbecher implemented multi-core support for AArch64/ARM64, and made some fixes. More testing need to done to determine the extent of the performance improvements.

Ring Buffer Communication For More Parallelism

After some months of work Ibuki Omatsu and Anhad Singh implemented a ring buffer communication API (Redox Rings) equivalent to Linux io_uring system call API to improve performance on supported drivers, with guidance from 4lDO2 and help from Wildan Mubarok to fix bugs.

This work improves the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS and RAMFS by a significant factor. In the benchmark below (bypassing the RedoxFS file system) it’s measured to improve I/O performance by 14-15x!!

redox_syscall (using synchronous system calls to measure NVMe read/write performance) and redox_ring (using ring buffers to measure NVMe read/write performance) benchmark comparison

redox_syscall (synchronous system call NVMe read/write performance) and redox_ring (ring buffer NVMe read/write performance) benchmark comparison

In-memory filesystem (ramfs) benchmark using ring buffers

In-memory filesystem (ramfs) benchmark using ring buffers

Significant Native Compilation Performance Improvement and OOM Fixes

After months of investigation by Wildan Mubarok on gradual GCC compilation performance degradation, he found and fixed a kernel memory leak that was causing the os-test test suite compilation time in GCC (on QEMU) to increase from 2 hours up to 10 hours, and causing out of memory (OOM) errors. Once fixed, the compilation time was reduced from 10 hours to around 30 minutes.

NUMA Support

Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) implemented the initial support for NUMA-based memory management. As we currently use QEMU to test NUMA behaviour, any help to test on real hardware would be much appreciated.

He also implemented local node allocation (locality of data) by default and a libredox API to modify NUMA allocation policies.

Process Priority Support Conclusion of the Scheduler Improvements RSoC project

Akshit Gaur implemented support for process priorities and system priority tuning, which improved general performance.

He also wrote the last EEVDF article giving the complete explanation after optimizations. Thanks a lot Akshit for the great work!

QEMU on Redox!

Ribbon and Wildan Mubarok confirmed/tested that QEMU is working on Redox. Ribbon tested the server variant of Redox in QEMU terminal mode and Wildan tested the desktop variant including the GTK frontend.

Redox does not yet have support for KVM-like virtual machine acceleration, so performance can be significantly slow.

Redox server variant on QEMU terminal mode above Redox desktop

Redox server variant on QEMU terminal mode above Redox desktop

Redox server variant on both QEMU terminal and GTK GUI

Redox server variant on both QEMU terminal and GTK GUI

Redox desktop variant on QEMU GTK GUI

Redox desktop variant on QEMU GTK GUI

Dual-boot Installation from Linux!

Wildan Mubarok improved the Linux support of Redox installer to allow a dual-boot installation of Redox, you can see this page to learn how to use it and the new GUI installer options.

Redox running on triple-boot

Redox running on triple-boot

Kernel Binary Size Profiling

4lDO2 implemented support for kernel binary size profiling to measure where it can be reduced, also reducing memory usage.

Kernel binary size flamegraph

Current File Access Design using Namespaces and Capability-based Security

Ibuki Omatsu created a diagram that summarizes how the openat function is used to resolve paths, using the namespace manager, as part of capability-based security. Read this for more details.

File access design diagram using namespaces and capability-based security

Better relibc Contribution Philosophy and Goals

4lDO2 documented the relibc safety philosophy and goals (for our POSIX/C Standard Library) to reduce the probability of undefined behavior and logic bugs being introduced. This primarily focuses on restricting unsafe code to the “leaf functions” of relibc for better oversight/review and less unsafe code in unexpected places. It also includes using more Rust-like error handling internally, to give more information than POSIX errors (easing the investigation of certain classes of bugs).

Kernel Improvements

(kernel) 4lDO2 reduced IPC overhead by 5%
(kernel) 4lDO2 reduced binary size by 2.2% by removing DTB code when not reached (x86-64 image, for example)
(kernel) 4lDO2 merged the redox_syscall library code into the kernel repository to ease changes
(kernel) Akshit Gaur did more improvements and fixes to EEVDF scheduler work stealing and Wildan Mubarok did some fixes, which improved performance
(kernel) Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) improved memory deallocation performance by reducing thread locking
(kernel) Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) fixed a panic in NUMA code
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok moved all scheme path handling to user-space
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed a potential bug where process killing could create zombie processes
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed a panic in FUTEX_WAIT64 system call

Driver Improvements

(driver) MJ Pooladkhay implemented PCI multi-vector MSI-X support, which will allow more driver performance features
(driver) MJ Pooladkhay fixed VirtIO device completions being lost
(driver) Wildan Mubarok fixed a pcid bug that Clippy detected
(driver) bjorn3 did some code deduplication and cleanup

System Improvements

(sys) Ibuki Omatsu implemented multi-threading support for schemes
(sys) Wildan Mubarok ported rldd to be our ldd tool implementation
(sys) Wildan Mubarok improved the scheme path parent gathering performance
(sys) Wildan Mubarok fixed some off-by-one file locking bugs, which helped SQLite and libsoup
(sys) Wildan Mubarok removed the a inputd non-fatal panic when no display is available
(sys) bjorn3 fixed potential inputd deadlocks
(sys) bjorn3 did some code deduplication

Relibc Improvements

(libc) 4lDO2 moved most of unsafe socket and getaddrinfo function code to leaf functions to reduce bugs by using concentration for much better readability
(libc) 4lDO2 implemented the RELIBC_COMMIT_HASH environment variable to show the relibc commit hash to fully confirm if static objects were updated with local changes or up-to-date
(libc) Ibuki Omatsu fixed broken SCM_RIGHTS on recvmsg function, a bug that was revealed after file descriptor allocation migration to user-space
(libc) bjorn3 fixed the getsockname and getpeername functions address length computation, which fixed some mio library tests
(libc) Wildan Mubarok implemented the rlct_clone function for Linux to fix pthread tests on Linux ARM64
(libc) Wildan Mubarok implemented mode read (except line buffering) and write (except borrowing) support and handling in setvbuf function
(libc) Wildan Mubarok improved the LD_DEBUG environment variable to show the relibc shared object memory location range to greatly improve crash debugging on dynamic linking
(libc) Wildan Mubarok improved epoll performance by calling the open function directly
(libc) Wildan Mubarok reduced application and library launch time by using constant functions in stdio initialization
(libc) Wildan Mubarok reduced unsafe Rust code in timer_t
(libc) Wildan Mubarok added more Unix socket tests
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed TLS load offset on ARM64, which fixed a tokio library panic on package manager
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed 64KiB-paged ELF loading on Linux ARM64
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed the clock_getres function behavior
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed a double close bug in fstatat function
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed NUL offset in ptsname_r
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed the pthread_kill-self test
(libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed a time/timer test
(libc) auronandace implemented tcgetsid function
(libc) auronandace replaced SYS_DUP_INTO, SYS_READ, and SYS_WRITE system calls with SYS_CALL system call to reduce system calls
(libc) auronandace reduced more as casting usage to prevent problems in code refactorings
(libc) auronandace did some code cleanup
(libc) auronandace, Wildan Mubarok, and Ibuki Omatsu fixed and enforced many Clippy lints and enabled tracking them on CI
(libc) Ben McCann implemented POSIX base in tzset and POSIX handling in mktime functions
(libc) Ben McCann added more tests to tzset function
(libc) Sunam Kang implemented MSG_NOSIGNAL in sendto function

Networking Improvements

(net) Wildan Mubarok improved DHCP missing DNS error handling messages

RedoxFS Improvements

(rfs) Wildan Mubarok implemented O_SYMLINK to allow symlink traversal across schemes
(rfs) Wildan Mubarok improved partition mount error handling to show error codes

Security Improvements

(safe) bjorn3 implemented rootless display opening on inputd
(safe) Ibuki Omatsu reimplemented the contain sandbox management tool to use the new namespace management, which now creates a per-process filter scheme that holds an actual namespace file descriptor, mediating all openat function calls by providing a file descriptor filter to programs (full chroot implementation is still WIP)
(safe) Wildan Mubarok updated the CA certificates to be up-to-date, which also fixed GnuTLS

Packaging Improvements

(pkg) Wildan Mubarok fixed a double counting bug in package extraction progress bar

Desktop Improvements

(desk) bjorn3 ported the Orbital login manager to winit and softbuffer libraries to allow Wayland testing in the future
(desk) bjorn3 disabled window decorations in fullscreen Orbital windows
(desk) bjorn3 fixed fullscreen or maximized Orbital window resize on display resize

Installer Improvements

(install) Wildan Mubarok fixed the input data handling of new GUI installer options
(install) Wildan Mubarok added a progress status when extracting packages

Programs

(app) Wildan Mubarok updated GNU nano from version 7.2 to 9.2
(app) Aadarsh fixed the GNU Binutils GDB variant compilation
(app) Wildan Mubarok updated the Kibi from version 0.3.2 to 0.3.3
(app) Wildan Mubarok fixed WebKit TLS bugs
(app) Wildan Mubarok fixed the EGL support on GTK3 port
(app) Wildan Mubarok fixed EGL partial rendering on Mesa3D

Testing Improvements

(test) 4lDO2 implemented benchmark metrics on acid test suite to detect performance regressions
(test) Wildan Mubarok started to use and enable Clippy on CI
(test) Wildan Mubarok reduced the Redox image CI verification time from around 25 minutes to around 7 minutes

Build System Improvements

(build) Wildan Mubarok updated the Cookbook recipe target list item combination to allow --all-* options usage, for example: make r.base,--all-binaries
(build) Wildan Mubarok implemented the COOKBOOK_TREELESS_CLONE environment variable to enable treeless clone in all recipes to greatly save storage space and and reduce download time
(build) Wildan Mubarok reimplemented most of script logic in Cookbook to reduce script maintenance cost and Ribbon fixed some regressions
(build) Wildan Mubarok fixed the make rebuild-push command (verify recipe source or package changes, incrementally rebuild or download and push new changes) not updating the filesystem configuration recipes, now the system can be properly and quickly updated in a existing Redox filesystem image
(build) Konstantin Shabanov fixed the Nix flake on Podman and Native builds
(build) Konstantin Shabanov applied cargo fix on code
(build) Ribbon replaced the ls tool by tree in show-package.sh script to make it much more useful by showing all recipe package directories and files

Documentation Improvements

(doc) Wildan Mubarok updated and improved the Installing Redox page with information for the new GUI installer options
(doc) Ribbon properly documented with more detail why we prefer POSIX/Linux source compatibility over binary compatibility on Developer FAQ
(doc) Ribbon documented the debugging tip that Linux KVM usage change bug behavior

Website Improvements

(web) Wildan Mubarok added LaTeX math support and improved the website dark mode to clearly show LaTeX formulas to fix the formulas in the last EEVDF article

How To Test The Changes

To test the changes of this month download the server or desktop variants of the daily images.

Use the desktop variant for a graphical interface. If you prefer a terminal-style interface, or if the desktop variant doesn’t work, please try the server variant.

If you want to test in a virtual machine use the “harddrive” images
If you want to test on real hardware use the “livedisk” images

Read the following pages to learn how to use the images in a virtual machine or real hardware:

Sometimes the daily images are outdated and you need to build Redox from source. For instructions on how to do this, read the Building Redox page.

Programs

To test the changes on applications and libraries, see if the wanted program is available in the following lists and run the following command to install them: sudo pkg install package-name

There’s also a package web interface if you want detailed package information:

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