This Month in Redox - September 2025

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on

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

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

RustConf Presentation

Jeremy Soller presented “10 Years of Rust and Redox” at RustConf this year, with some great stories about the history of Redox, and some awesome insights into Redox’s future. Jeremy’s talk was one of the Marquee presentations, on the main stage to all RustConf attendees. Many people felt it was one of the most enjoyable and informative sessions at the conference. Grab some popcorn and enjoy an entertaining presentation with a surprise ending!

You can see the slides on this link.

Multi-threaded By Default!

Jeremy Soller and bjorn3 fixed some key bugs in multi-threading and enabled it by default for x86. This can give a massive performance improvement depending on the hardware specifications.

ffplay playing a 1080p video

Massive Small File Performance Improvement On RedoxFS

Jeremy Soller implemented inode data inlining for small files which resulted in a massive performance improvement, a reduction of storage I/O operations, size of file caching and frequency of context switches by a factor of 2 in all small file operation types.

Wildan Mubarok measured that a benchmark to add packages to an existing QEMU image became 7.5 times faster!

Massive Installation Performance Improvement

Jeremy Soller improved lived to preserve the original live disk data in memory (writes go to temporary memory), the installer can find this and use a new clone feature in RedoxFS to quickly clone the filesystem to a new disk (potentially the new disk also has encryption).

This prevents having to run a thread for the new RedoxFS and context switch to the original RedoxFS and also lived, the whole clone is done in a single transaction with a large write cache, meaning it also has much fewer switches to the storage driver.

Including the inode data inlining optimization the benchmark is 10 times faster than before!

LZ4 Compression On RedoxFS

Jeremy Soller implemented LZ4 compression which saved storage space and improved performance.

Redox on Google Pixel!

Jeremy Soller successfully ported Redox to Google Pixel 3! currently only the screen is working.

Redox running on Google Pixel 3

Redox on BlackBerry!

Paul Sajna (sajattack) ported Redox to BlackBerry KEY2 LE, currently the keyboard is not working.

He wrote an article about the achievement:

https://blog.paulsajna.com/redox-in-your-pocket/

Redox running on Blackberry KEY2 LE

Redox on Hackaday!

Tyler August wrote an article about Redox on BlackBerry in Hackaday, quite possibly the first Redox OS article there.

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/24/who-wants-a-rusty-old-smartphone/

OpenSSH on Redox!

The moment finally came, Wildan Mubarok successfully ported OpenSSH to Redox.

It will allow us to remotely control the system on both QEMU and real hardware.

Nginx and PHP on Redox!

Wildan Mubarok successfully ported Nginx and PHP to Redox.

Neovim on Redox!

Wildan Mubarok successfully ported Neovim.

CPython 3.12 on Redox!

A recent version of CPython is finally working on Redox, thanks to the amazing work of Wildan Mubarok!

OpenSSL 3.x on Redox!

Wildan Mubarok successfully ported the 3.x version of OpenSSL to allow more programs or their recent/latest stable versions to work.

Deadlock Prevention and Detection at Compile-Time

Jeremy Soller implemented Ordered Locks in the kernel, based on the ordered_locks crate, to assign tokens to locks. It uses the Rust type system and typestates to detect potential deadlocks at compile-time. We weren’t able to use the ordered_locks crate directly due to dependencies, but we are happy to share ideas or implementation.

Some potential deadlocks were fixed using this, making Redox’s multi-threading more reliable.

Server Demo Variant

Wildan Mubarok created the server-demo variant with OpenSSH, Nginx, PHP, CPython, SQLite 3.x, Rsync, Neovim and others included.

Expanded Redoxer

Wildan Mubarok improved the Redoxer Docker container to use local packages inside the container instead of downloading a new one each time it runs, which is important for the CI to avoid random errors caused by new packages.

Wildan Mubarok expanded Redoxer to allow Rust programs using C libraries compiled to Redox to work.

Test Reports

Ron Williams created a repository to store the results of test suites that we can run (currently os-test and Open POSIX Test Suite).

Complete TOML Migration of Recipes

bjorn3 finished the conversion of the most important and relevant remaining recipes from shell scripts to TOML. It fixed some bugs and will allow our build system and software porting to be improved, expanded and tested more easily.

New Home Page!

Wildan Mubarok improved the Redox website home page with a responsive design, more information and additional links. Click on the Redox logo in the header of this article to see the new layout.

Bootloader Improvements

Kernel Improvements

Driver Improvements

Relibc Improvements

Packaging Improvements

Orbital Improvements

Programs

Testing Improvements

Debugging Improvements

Build System Improvements

Documentation Improvements

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.

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.

Join us on Matrix Chat

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