Yesterday, the team at Redox released Redox OS 0.5.0, a Unix like operating system written in Rust. The team has added important programs and libraries to this release.
What’s new in Redox OS 0.50?
Cairo
This release comes with Cairo, a 2D graphics library that supports multiple output devices. It produces consistent output on all output media and takes advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It is implemented as a library which is written in the C programming language, while the bindings are available for various programming languages.
relibc
Redox OS 0.50 features relibc, a portable POSIX C standard library which is written in Rust and supports Redox and Linux. It reduces the issues with newlib and further creates a safer alternative to a C standard library. It has been designed to be used under redox, as an alternative to newlib.
Event system
The event system has been redesigned for providing support for select and poll. This release comes with new packages added to the Cookbook as well as for memory mapping support implemented in it.
Standard images
This release comes with new images based on new bootloaders for coreboot and EFI. The team has worked towards providing libraries for EFI Rust development and for developing coreboot payloads in Rust.
LLVM
This release also features the LLVM Project which is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. The LLVM Core libraries come with a target-independent optimizer and a code generation support for popular CPUs.
GLib
This version of Redox OS comes with GLib which is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME.
Pixman
Redox OS 0.50 comes with Pixman that is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation that features image compositing and trapezoid rasterization.
Orbital widget toolkit
This release comes with Orbital Widget Toolkit which is a multi-platform GUI toolkit for building user interfaces with Rust. This toolkit is based on the entity component system pattern which provides a functional-reactive API. It provides fast performance and ease over cross-platform development.
Few users are happy and excited about this release and are appreciating the Redox team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Congrats on getting another release out the door! I was beginning to fear that momentum was stalling in lieu of PopOS. Keep up the great work!”
The developer of Redox OS shared that there are still security concerns in the kernel with regards to memory management. He commented, “There are a couple known security issues in the kernel regarding memory management. One is that memory is granted in pages, so buffers passed to a scheme are over-mapped for the process handling it. You have to be root to handle a scheme, so it was not a high severity issue.”
He further added that there are concerns with the grants which can be dropped by owning process and highlighted that more kernel work is needed.
He commented, “Another is that grants can be dropped by the owning process while in use by another process. This can lead to the re-allocation of said grants in the owning process, making memory accessible to the other users of the grant. More kernel work is needed to prevent schemes from leaking data in this manner.”
To know more about this news in detail, check out Redox’s official announcement.
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