Redox OS 0.7.0

By jackpot51 on Thursday, April 28, 2022

Overview

A lot has changed since release 0.6.0! First thing, it is impossible to collect all the changes that happened since December 24, 2020 into one set of release notes, so this will focus on the highlights.

It was very important to me that this be a release targeting the foundations of Redox OS. This includes, the bootloader, the filesystem, the package manager, the kernel, the drivers, and much more. The focus was on enabling Redox OS to boot on the widest set of hardware possible.

• bootloader: The bootloader was completely rewritten so that both the BIOS and UEFI versions share most of the same code, and are both predominantly written in Rust. This has led to greatly improved hardware support, and allowed for RedoxFS to be improved.

• kernel: A number of fixes and new features were added to the kernel, and code was removed. Hardware support was improved, as well as performance.

  • Preliminary support for aarch64 has been added
  • All paths are now required to be UTF-8, and the kernel enforces this
  • CPU specific variables use the GS register, with various improvements coming from this
  • All physical memory is mapped, recursive paging has been removed
  • ACPI AML code was moved to acpid, a new userspace daemon
  • Inline assembly rewritten to be stable with future compilers
  • Initfs moved to a new file, which significantly improves packaging
  • Many kernel issues have been fixed

• redoxfs: RedoxFS was rewritten to be a Copy-on-Write filesystem, with transactional updates and signatures for both metadata and data. This design greatly increases the reliability of RedoxFS. Additionally, transparent encryption was added, using AES with hardware acceleration if available. The bootloader now uses the same driver code as the operating system does, and this allows the bootloader to unlock the filesystem, allowing the kernel and initfs to be encrypted and hashed by the filesystem.

• relibc: Relibc has had constant various changes that have enabled the porting of more software, as well as fixing issues in many C programs and libraries. This work was incredibly varied and hard to summarize.

• rust: We now have a version of rustc that can run on Redox OS! There is still work to be done to improve the performance and to ensure cargo can run on Redox OS projects from inside Redox OS.

I really wanted to go into more depth, but the time since the last release has been pretty long and the changes wild and free (as in freedom). I hope to create Redox OS releases more regularly, which will also decrease the changes that have to be rediscovered in order to write the release notes.

Images

Verify compressed images with sha256sum: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/SHA256SUM

Extract compressed images with gunzip before flashing to a USB drive, or loading in a VM.

• x86_64 BIOS
  • OVA (recommended for virtual machine): https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_harddrive.ova
  • CD: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_livedisk.iso.gz
  • SSD: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_harddrive.bin.gz
  • USB: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_livedisk.bin.gz
• x86_64 UEFI
  • USB (recommended for real hardware): https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_livedisk-efi.bin.gz
  • SSD: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.7.0/redox_2022-04-28_570_harddrive-efi.bin.gz

Discussion

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