This Month in Redox - April 2026 - Redox - Your Next(Gen) OS
This Month in Redox - April 2026
By Ribbon and Ron Williams
on Thursday, April 30, 2026
Redox OS is a complete Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system<br>written in Rust. April was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news.
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Improved Boot on Real Hardware
This month, we have made system boot more resilient and better able to avoid getting stuck.<br>Wildan Mubarok provided fixes and addressed some long-time regressions after the 0.9.0 release, allowing boot to continue even if certain important drivers exited or became blocked.
A summary of his changes are:
Updated and rebased against the upstream Rust-OSDev acpi crate to improve support for many computers, and VirtualBox
Fixed the boot stuck by driver exits
Reduced the boot time of computers with multiple CPU cores
If you had problems booting Redox on real hardware, or in VirtualBox, please test the daily images again and report the status to us.
Better RISC-V Compatibility
AArch Angel improved the RISC-V real hardware compatibility by switching to the Sv39 MMU scheme and adding bootloader workarounds
tmux on Redox!
Wildan Mubarok successfully ported tmux, which allows terminal-agnostic multiplexing.
Accurate System Stats
Wildan Mubarok improved the accuracy of the CPU time stats reported to system monitors like htop.
htop
Better Orbital Performance
Wildan Mubarok implemented the support for partial window pixel update (partial pixel blit) which improved performance by only redrawing window pixels that changed.
Partial blit in NetSurf
The purple rectangles show the pixels being updated in the NetSurf window
Package Web Interface
Wildan Mubarok has enabled Cookbook Web Mode which creates a website with package information, similar to the package search pages in Linux distribution websites. This website functionality was implemented some time ago, and is now available to everyone.
You can access it in the following links:
x86-64 Packages
i586 Packages
ARM64 (aarch64) Packages
RISC-V (riscv64gc) Packages
Kernel Improvements
(kernel) 4lDO2 fixed the performance profiler
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok improved multi-threading stability
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok implemented process shared memory stats
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok improved vector allocation and removal performance
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok improved mmap performance
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed many potential deadlocks
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed many stability and performance regressions
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed a memory leak
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed the process CPU affinity reporting being blank, now it works
(kernel) Wildan Mubarok added more ordered locks
(kernel) bjorn3 enabled more compile-time code checking to prevent accumulated breakage of disabled features
(kernel) bjorn3 greatly reduced code duplication
(kernel) bjorn3 fixed some code warnings
(kernel) bjorn3 did many code cleanups
(kernel) Speedy_Lex applied many Clippy lints
Driver Improvements
(drivers) Wildan Mubarok increased the IDE driver read timeout to fix COSMIC Terminal in the online demo async mode
(drivers) bjorn3 updated the xHCI driver to load configuration files at runtime instead of compile-time to improve USB testing
(drivers) bjorn3 did some code cleanups
System Improvements
(sys) 4lDO2 created a service for profiled to autostart when it’s installed to ease performance profiling
(sys) bjorn3 fixed init dynamic linking
(sys) bjorn3 added a deadlock workaround in initnsmgr
(sys) bjorn3 moved some filesystem configuration to the base repository to ease development
(sys) bjorn3 improved the Makefile to build drivers/initfs and changed the base recipe to use it
(sys) bjorn3 unified the base and base-initfs recipes, allowing the initfs image to be automatically updated in case of system component or driver changes (except RedoxFS, you need to use the make rp.redoxfs,base command) and simplifying configuration
(sys) bjorn3 replaced the Bochs video driver with the VESA driver to reduce code duplication
(sys) bjorn3 created the scheme-utils library and tooling to help in the implementation of new schemes
(sys) Wildan Mubarok updated ion to be dynamically linked
(sys) Wildan Mubarok merged the installer-gui repository into the installer repository
Relibc Improvements
(libc) Landon Propes implemented the faccessat, fchownat, unlinkat, symlinkat, and linkat functions
(libc) Landon Propes exposed the openat() function to user applications
(libc) Landon Propes added more limits header constants
(libc) Landon Propes fixed the printf() float alternate
(libc) Landon Propes fixed some conversions in printf() if a precision is used
(libc) Landon Propes reduced code duplication
(libc) Wildan Mubarok improved the Rust-based math header
(libc)...