This Month in Redox - June 2025

By Ribbon and Ron Williams on

Redox OS is a Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. June 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!

NLnet/NGI Zero Grants!

Redox has been awarded two new grants by the NGI Zero Commons fund and NLnet Foundation.

The amounts of the grants is still to be determined, but each project should be about 2 to 4 months work.

Redox is hiring a Build Engineer!

In addition to our development position announced in last month’s report, Redox is looking for a part-time Build/CI Engineer. This is a remote position, and there are no geographical restrictions, other than you must be eligible to receive payment from a US-based non-profit. We have a budget of US$1,000 per month available for this position, so we are open to proposals with flexible work schedules, and are open to ideas about your responsibilities.

The primary responsibility is to monitor Redox’s build and CI to identify the cause of failures and repair them, either by working with the developers, applying fixes or rolling back changes to the various Redox gitlab repos.

Other possible responsibilities and tasks include:

Qualifications include some or all of:

Email president@redox-os.org, CC info@redox-os.org. Write a short proposal indicating how much time you would be available, given our budget constraints. Tell us about your build and GitLab expertise, some of the areas above where you would like to make a contribution, and the relevant skills and experience you have.

Wayland and Unix Domain Sockets

As we continue to move forward with our plans for Wayland, a key technology for Wayland support is the ability to send file descriptors over Unix Domain Sockets. File descriptor sending is also an important part of many other OS features, including Capability-based Security.

Our Redox Summer of Code project to implement that ability has been progressing very well. Ibuki, a new member of the Redox team, has jumped right into the deep end, and implemented the sendmg and recvmsg functionality, and continues to move forward with work on UDS.

Understanding how Redox enables sending file descriptors gives some key insights into how Redox services collaborate. Read all about it in Ibuki’s RSoC news post.

Redox at RustConf

RustConf 2025 is in Seattle, September 2-5. Jeremy Soller will be presenting “10 Years of Rust and Redox”, including our shared history with Rust, and our vision for the future of Redox.

We hope to see you there!

COSMIC Desktop Presentation

Jeremy Soller, Redox founder and architect, and principal engineer at System76, along with System76 CEO Carl Richell, presented the COSMIC Desktop Environment at the Open Source Summit.

Redox has adopted some of the main applications from the COSMIC Desktop, and we plan to use the COSMIC Compositor as soon as we complete our Wayland support.

Network Booting Support

bjorn3 implemented network booting (PXE) support allowing Redox to be booted from the local network or Internet.

Currently only UEFI is supported.

Kernel Improvements

System Call Improvements

Driver Improvements

System Improvements

RedoxFS Improvements

Relibc Improvements

Networking Improvements

Testing Improvements

Packaging Improvements

Terminal Improvements

Programs

Build System Improvements

Before that the i686, ARM64 and RISC-V configurations couldn’t disable the broken recipes from the complete/CPU-agnostic root configurations

Documentation Improvements

Website 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 server variant for a terminal interface and the desktop variant for a graphical interface, if the desktop variant doesn’t work use 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.