Hello. I’m new to Redox OS and I want to know how fast it is compared to other operating systems specially linux. I am very welk aware of Redox OS kernel type is microkernel and it can never reach linux performance because of that but if we imagine that linux was a microkernel, could Redox achieve same performance as microkernel linux?
Hi and welcome! I talked a little bit about performance here in the second half of the second paragraph – but overall this is just not the right time for Redox to talk about performance. Redox is still in its infancy and to compare it against Linux is like comparing Usain Bolt vs Linford Christie in Summer 1992 – with Usain beeing ~6 years old and Linford winning gold medal in 100m sprint. Linux currently has the worlds Who’s Who in engineering power under its belt. Whats important is the prospect and the things we learned on the journey to current Linux. And one big lesson here is that C is very hard to get right and to have a big monolithic block of code to behave is just an engineering wonder. From my point of view, its a miracle that Linux is this stable and this is due to the fact that very talented people are putting huge amounts of effort in it to get to that point. But we should ask ourself if this amount of work is spend on the right part. What if we could have a language that would cut this cost in half and an architecture that would do the same? What if we could spend the now “free time” of those developers into features and speed improvements? We cannot give an answer to “what if Rust and Redox existed at the time Linus created Linux and what if the same amount of effort had gone into Redox”. If i recall correctly there is an estimation of about $10 billion that fedora around 2008 would have cost if it was developed from scratch. We cannot estimate what Redox + $10 billion and 15 years development time would bring to light – but we hope that with Rust + Microkernel Architecture the cut for debugging, testing, patching, fixing would be significantly less than in the current Linux/C ecosystem and that this time/money/labor could get into new features/more speed. And at that point i would rival the dogma of the less performant Microkernel. And we didn’t even talked about architectural changes in the hardware department.
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