The Current State & Plans For Porting Linux/BSD Software To Redox OS

A new blog post was posted by the Redox OS team that is working on their Rust-written micro-kernel designed open-source operating system. Their latest post lays out their porting strategy for getting more Linux and BSD user-space software running on this Rust-based OS.

Redox OS isn't focusing on any BSD/Linux compatibility layer type approaches but is working on getting more software to build cleanly on the platform. For getting graphical programs on Redox OS, the SDL framework supports Redox's Orbital display server as does the winit library. Redox developers to plan to port Qt and GTK to the OS that in turn will allow for more GUI apps running on the operating system. One important item to note though is that Redox OS does not yet support accelerated GPU drivers.

While not yet having accelerated graphics and their Wayland support is still some ways out, they have ported some games/emulators to Redox OS already like DOSBox, Neverball, OpenTTD, ScummVM, 2048, and others.

Monday's Redox blog post on the Redox OS porting effort sums the current state as:

"Porting is a major part of the Redox development effort. We are using porting as a way to prioritize and validate Redox functionality.

Currently dozens of programs and many more libraries work. Our initial focus has been on porting Rust programs, but we also recognize the importance of supporting programs written in other languages.

In last year Ribbon began the porting of more than 1000 programs and libraries to Redox! They are still work-in-progress and many require customized cross-compilation scripts or improved library support. You can see them here.

With our recent change to a Linux-compatible path format, we have removed a major hurdle to supporting Linux applications. In the future we plan to expand our POSIX support, port more Rust crates and continue to improve Relibc.

Some thought is being given to virtual machines and Wine as possible mechanisms for running proprietary binaries and possibly even proprietary drivers. However, there are no specific plans for that capability at this time."

Are you excited by the prospects of Redox OS? Let us know in the forums.