This Month in Redox - August 2025

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Sunday, August 31, 2025

Redox OS is a 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.

• COSMIC Reader running on Redox

Donate to Redox

If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch!

• Donate
• Patreon
• Merch

RustConf 2025

Jeremy will be presenting at RustConf 2025 in Seattle! Jeremy Soller, the creator of Redox, will be presenting 10 Years of Redox and Rust. His presentation is on Thursday, September 4 at 10:55am.

If you can attend in person, please feel free to DM Jeremy to organize a meetup. There are also free tickets for virtual attendees.

New Build Engineer

Redox has hired a part-time build engineer. Wildan Mubarok (willnode on Matrix Chat) will be responsible for monitoring our GitLab, ensuring our packages and images are being built correctly, and tracking down CI problems. He will also be improving our build system and contributing to Redox as his time allows. Welcome Wildan!

Redox is Hiring!

We are still looking for an experienced Kernel/Core engineer. Please check out the July report for details. If you think you are a good fit, please send your resume/CV and a link to your open source projects to president@redox-os.org, cc info@redox-os.org .

Fixed Dynamically Linked Package Size

Wildan Mubarok fixed a problem where some dynamically linked program packages were carrying static library objects making them very big in size. This fix reduced the size of packages and images a lot!

COSMIC Reader on Redox!

Jeremy Soller ported the COSMIC Reader (document viewer) and will be using it for his upcoming presentation at RustConf.

Bootloader Improvements

• (boot) Bjorn Beishline fixed DMA bugs in ARM64 virtualization

Kernel Improvements

• (kernel) Wildan Mubarok implemented the ARM virtual timer
• (kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed the formatting check on CI
• (kernel) lebakassemmerl fixed the ARM64 compilation

Driver Improvements

• (drivers) Wildan Mubarok allowed drivers to be debugged with GDB
• (drivers) Wildan Mubarok fixed possible panic in device enumeration
• (drivers) Wildan Mubarok fixed a fbcond panic when vim quit
• (drivers) bjorn3 fixed the EHB flag reading for debugging logs in the xHCI driver
• (drivers) bjorn3 did a code cleanup in the xHCI and NVMe interrupt handling
• (drivers) bjorn3 did a code deduplication and cleanup in the MSI/MSI-X handling

System Improvements

• (sys) bjorn3 fixed network booting in QEMU with Debian 13
• (sys) Ron Williams fixed the which tool exit code
• (sys) Wildan Mubarok fixed the root scheme (:) creation in exampled

Virtualization Improvements

• (virt) bjorn3 enabled QEMU UEFI by default for x86-64
• (virt) bjorn3 fixed the QEMU terminal mode in ARM64 and RISC-V
• (virt) bjorn3 fixed multi-display support on QEMU BIOS
• (virt) bjorn3 added support for using the ramfb QEMU device on x86
• (virt) Wildan Mubarok enabled HVF for QEMU on MacOS Silicon

Relibc Improvements

• (relibc) Josh Megnauth implemented the fstatat() and confstr() functions
• (relibc) Josh Megnauth implemented the paths.h function group
• (relibc) Josh Megnauth did several improvements to the syslog functionality
• (relibc) Josh Megnauth added the %m format to printf(), to print the correct error string for errno
• (relibc) Josh Megnauth implemented the _POSIX_VDISABLE extension
• (relibc) Josh Megnauth fixed the sysconf.h function group in Linux
• (relibc) Wildan Mubarok implemented the getnameinfo(), getaddrinfo(), sem_timedwait(), and sem_clockwait() functions
• (relibc) Wildan Mubarok fixed the trace feature
• (relibc) Darley Barreto enabled some tests for Redox
• (relibc) Ron Williams added a few constants to allow some POSIX Signals tests to pass
• (relibc) Jeremy Soller implemented some additional basic types to improve compatibility
• (relibc) Jeremy Soller fixed a typo that was causing the connect() function to fail

Networking Improvements

• (net) voedipus fixed the logic of counting received records in the ping tool

Orbital Improvements

• (gui) Jeremy Soller implemented fullscreen support
• (gui) Wildan Mubarok disabled the launcher bar overlap when maximizing a window
• (gui) Wildan Mubarok optimized graphical debug scrolling

Programs

• (programs) Wildan Mubarok fixed the OpenSSH compilation
• (programs) Wildan Mubarok fixed and updated Vim (9.1 version)
• (programs) Wildan Mubarok added dynamic linking support to our SDL2 fork
• (programs) Wildan Mubarok reduced the size of the terminfo dependency to speed up the Redox image creation and installation
• (programs) Josh Megnauth fixed and updated SDL2_mixer to 2.8.1 version
• (programs) Petr Hrdina fixed the libtool compilation by updating it to version 2.5.4
• (programs) Ribbon enabled meta-packages in the x86-64 package server
• (programs) Ribbon added “minimal” and “full” meta-package variants for X11

Debugging Improvements

• (debug) Wildan Mubarok implemented a way to debug any recipe using QEMU
• (debug) bjorn3 implemented a way to start a debuggable QEMU VM without waiting for GDB

Testing Improvements

• (tests) bjorn3 improved the Redoxer daemon error reporting reliability and messages
• (tests) bjorn3 did a code cleanup in the Redoxer daemon
• (tests) auronandace packaged the os-test POSIX test suite

Build System Improvements

• (build) Wildan Mubarok updated the Podman container to Debian 13 to fix it
• (build) Wildan Mubarok updated cbindgen in the Podman container to support a feature for Rust 2024 edition
• (build) Wildan Mubarok changed the Podman Rust tooling installation script to use precompiled binaries and speedup recipe compilation
• (build) Wildan Mubarok enabled dynamic linking by default for GNU Autotools, CMake and Meson templates
• (build) Wildan Mubarok implemented Cookbook templates for CMake and Meson
• (build) Wildan Mubarok implemented the configureflags, cmakeflags, and mesonflags data types for GNU Autotools, CMake and Meson flags when using their Cookbook templates
• (build) Wildan Mubarok added an option (QEMU_ON_WINDOWS) to run QEMU on Windows from WSL2
• (build) Wildan Mubarok fixed the meta-packages
• (build) Wildan Mubarok fixed the make clean command
• (build) Wildan Mubarok fixed a GNU Make misconfiguration in the Podman Build on MacOS
• (build) Wildan Mubarok improved the performance of the make rebuild command by 50% or more by caching recipe dependencies
• (build) Wildan Mubarok disabled the rustdoc installation in Podman to reduce the setup time
• (build) Wildan Mubarok did a cleanup on Cookbook
• (build) Ribbon simplified the dev variant configuration with meta-packages

Documentation Improvements

• (doc) Wildan Mubarok improved the system boot documentation
• (doc) Ribbon added the “Easy and quick to expand” microkernel benefit

Website Improvements

• (web) Wildan Mubarok changed the CSS framework from Bootstrap 3 to Bulma to allow better design
• (web) Wildan Mubarok fixed the font colors of dark and light modes

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:

• Running Redox in a virtual machine
• Running Redox on real hardware

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

Join us on Matrix Chat

If you want to contribute, give feedback or just listen in to the conversation, join us on Matrix Chat.