I’m a newish and very enthusiastic Linux user who came across this project on the Lunduke Show. I also work as a programmer in Japan. I’m very intrigued by Redox, as I’m the type who likes to redesign things from the ground up in a simpler way. I’m not a fan of some of the directions certain projects in Linux are heading (Wayland, for instance), so I want to learn more so that I can eventually become involved in the direction and development of the systems that I use.
I’m not a Rust programmer (yet), but this project intrigues me as something I want to follow and possibly contribute to when I have the time.
Also: huge props for having a forum! I love forums and the communities they build. On a whim, I decided to look up redox again, saw that you had a website and a forum, and here I am
I’ve been involved with the Commodore Amiga computers since one year before the company went bust in 1994. I’m interested in getting a parallel processing kernel and drivers for the AROS hosted OS. AROS is source code compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 and some of it’s offshoot libraries and is unique in the way that it can run hosted as an app on top of another kernel. AROS was originally developed on top of Linux so getting a bunch of old Amiga software to run on RedoxOS would be really neat! The faults of AmigaOS are that it is written using a single-threaded multitasking microkernel with no memory protection on top of custom graphics chips in the era when GPUs didn’t exist if your company didn’t make its own as Commodore did.
What I’d like to see first in Redox would be the ability to use ARM Linux’s binary blob drivers for OpenGL-ES so that my RasPi2 and ODroid XU4 can run at full speed for a change. On Linux, most programs still rely on the single-threaded performance of one core so the RasPi2 and ODroid ARM-based computers don’t really stand a chance at performing well.
Finally, getting to the point, I have worked with an Amiga-derived SoC called the Vampire whose Apollo 68080 softcore, when complete, will be fully 64-bit and have about 48 registers (32 of which are general purpose). It’s backward compatible to running AmigaOS 3.x and may someday run AROS but there will be no point in making a multicore ASIC someday if the OS it runs is 32-bit single-threaded. An odd thing about the 68080 is its MMU architecture. It’s got 2 MMU-style units per core: a regular MMU with a huge 256k page size to keep page tables small, and a memory protection unit (MPU) with byte-level granularity for memory protection purposes (obviously). Someday I’d like to see a modern new Amiga since the original ones got shafted by poor management in the early 90’s.
It’ll be a while before I can contribute since I don’t know Rust yet but I have it installed on my Linux boxes now and will hopefully have some time to pick it up in the next few months.
Hope I haven’t bored you too much with my Amiga stories of yesteryear!
Hello; I’m Jason and I’ve been very excited about Rust after first learning about it a couple of years ago (memory safety FTW).
I, probably like most people here, have wondered what it would be to write an operating system from scratch in Rust. There have been quite a few projects that have popped up, but I’m glad to see this one has continued to move along at a good clip.
I’ve made some incredibly minimal contributions to ion, but it’s been quite a while since then.
I’ve started exploring the project again after seeing a Reddit post mentioning Redox running on baremetal on recent Thinkpads.
I’d like to get involved with some filesystem development (I focus on block storage in my day job).
Hello! My name is Jörgen and I’ve been playing around with computers and programming since I was a kid in the 1980ies. Now I’ve been working in software development for 20+ years, mostly embedded systems using various operating systems.
I started learning rust a couple of years ago and have been thinking that a more secure OS for embedded devices is much needed and it should be written in rust. And here is Redox!
Hey, Rob from the UK here. Been interested in microkernels and OS Security / Privacy for a while and have been looking for something to replace my interest in Minix since I lost interest in the direction that was going and real life got busy until I found Redox.
Looking forward to enjoying the journey and dipping my toes in the water when the time is right.
Hello, I’m Chad. I work as an SRE, primarily with large on-prem Kubernetes clusters on Linux. I also run a couple OpenBSD boxes as firewalls. I’m intrigued by the Redox project as something that could benefit the broader computing world through various components, even if it doesn’t gain widespread use as a whole, in much the same way that OpenBSD has been influential through the creation of OpenSSH and LibreSSL.
That said, I also think there’s some interesting potential for the whole stack, kernel included, becoming useful soon in the container world with some new virtualization technologies like Kata “containers” and Amazon’s Firecracker project. These lightweight VMs might make it fairly easy to imagine Redox showing up as a viable option for certain server workloads (particularly Rust web frameworks) not long after attaining a fairly basic level of virtual hardware support.
I find this container-looking-vm path more compelling as an early use-case than traditional virtual machines because of the amount of other software that’s typically needed when you have a longer-lived machine to manage in production (sshd, config management agents, ldap/kerberos stuff, all manner of monitoring daemons, ntpd, etc.).
Anyway, I look forward finding ways I can help. In the meantime, I’m trying to sharpen my Rust skills by working through the cryptopals challenges in Rust.
I am extremely fascinated with this project. I am learning rust and hope to contribute and maintain something one day. I am a long time linux power user and I’m switching to the Ion shell fulltime. I will be contributing any relevant scripts that could possibly make someone’s life easier.
Hello.
My name Is Emil. I am a wanna be pioneer & entrepreneur. Also I am a PhD researcher (student) exploring the idea of microkernels replacing the current generation of kernels. More exactly, right now, I am exploring the idea of the benefits using a microkernel in HPC mainframes.
I am a fan of most things that are designed from first principles outside the mainstream and that goes for computer stuff too. To wit, I type on an ergonomic keyboard with non-qwerty layout, and occasionally dabble with alternative operating systems. My programming skills are limited but I conquered QMK to write my firmware for keyboard, and I aspire to be more of a writer, should the latter skills be handy to this project.
I clocked this project a year or two back, but it seems to be making real progress this year based on the forum starting to receive regular posts. I look forward to seeing it blossom further, and getting to the point where I feel able to attempt installation!
Hi, I am relatively new to OS programming, yet I find it very interesting. I have programmed a lot in C# and Java before. The most intriguing of OS programming for myself is the kernel.
Hello. I had the probably terrible idea to learn shell scripting with Ion. I will make stupid questions in the Ion section. I didn’t want to at first because I worried about taking up developer’s precious time, but I figured if no one asked stupid questions there would be no answers for other stupid people like me to find online.
Hey, I got an update! I’m basically done with the manual and it wasn’t a terrible idea at all. Ion is pretty nice and I encourage others to try it. The language is pretty small, so it doesn’t cost much time to learn.
Hi. I am a student from San Francisco, and I want to contribute to help me learn Rust and Systems/OS development. I have been coding in Rust for a few months, and in C# and TypeScript for a year or so.
Hello! I have been interested in Operating System programming for a while, but I don’t have any experience. I mostly just play around programming in Haskell, but also know some JavaScript and Python. I have just begun learning rust.
Hello I am Zyansheep
I think Redox is pretty cool and I can’t wait to see how it will evolve (maybe even replace Linux someday?) I can’t wait to boot up my computer in a fraction of a second and have all my drivers custom-selected for my hardware.
I’m currently working on a project written in rust that combines the anonymity of TOR with the file-distribution efficiency of IPFS as a peer-to-peer base for any kind of decentralized app you could imagine. (cryptocurrencies, anonymous chatting, distributed comment systems, content sharing, package distribution etc.)
Hi, i am new to Rust and i am looking forward to master Rust. The reason i have high hopes for Rust is that it solved most of the problems in C/C++. I was a web developer working with frameworks such as Vue.js, Adonis.js and Electron, I abandoned web development in order to learn operating system development and Rust, Javascript is a very slow language compared to C/C++ or other compiled languages. I love the software to be as perfect as possible. Why write a slow app in an interpreted language like Python, Java etc if you can do it better in C/C++ or even much better in Rust.
I believe that the programming language is the building block of any software, if that building block has flaws and design problems, this will make the software we write buggy and may lead to security issues hidden for years before they are discovered.
I think it will be better using only Rust in an operating system and all of its applications, this will help a lot in eliminating all those other low quality languages and help people learn only one language to be able to contribute in the code and create new software.
Hello folks!
My name is Jacob, I’m finishing up my Junior year of a degree in Computer Engineering right now. I have been watching Redox for about five years, and have been thinking about throwing my hat in the ring. With the release of 0.7.0, I thought it would be a perfect time to step in.
I have taken a few stabs at developing an OS but I was in high school at the time so it wasn’t very powerful. I have also built a few small toy projects in Rust - nothing at scale - but I would love to help. Along with programming I also enjoy technical writing.
