Redox is an operating system written in Rust, a language with focus on safety and high performance. Redox, following the microkernel design, aims to be secure, usable, and free. Redox is inspired by previous kernels and operating systems, such as SeL4, Minix, Plan 9, and BSD.

Redox is not just a kernel, it's a full-featured Operating System, providing packages (memory allocator, file system, display manager, core utilities, etc.) that together makes up a functional and convenient operating system. You can loosly think of it as the GNU or BSD ecosystem, but in a memory safe language and with modern technology. See this list for overview of the ecosystem.

The website can be found at https://www.redox-os.org.

Please make sure you use the latest nightly of rustc before building (for more troubleshooting, see "Help! Redox won't compile!").

Contents

• What it looks like
• Ecosystem
• Help! Redox won't compile
• Contributing to Redox
• Cloning, Building and running
• Quick Setup
• Manual Setup

What it looks like

Ecosystem

The ecosystem and software Redox OS provides is listed below.

Name (lexiographic order)	Maintainer
Ion (shell)	@skylerberg & @jackpot51
RANSID	@jackpot51
Sodium (editor)	@ticki
Standard library	@jackpot51
TFS (filesystem)	@ticki
The Redox book	@ticki
The old kernel	abandoned
ZFS	abandoned, superseded by TFS
acid tests	@jackpot51 (co.: @ticki, **@nilset)
binutils	@ticki
bots (other internal bots)	@ticki
cookbook	@jackpot51
coreutils	@ticki (co.: @stratact)
extrautils	@ticki
games	@ticki
kernel	@jackpot51
libextra	@ticki
libpager	@ticki
magnet (future package manager)	@ticki
netutils	@jackpot51
orbclient	@jackpot51
orbdata	@jackpot51
orbital	@jackpot51
orbtk	@stratact
orbutils	@jackpot51
pkgutils (current package manager)	@jackpot51
playbot (internal REPL bot)	@ticki
ralloc	@ticki
redoxfs (old filesystem)	@jackpot51
syscall	@jackpot51
userutils	@jackpot51

Help! Redox won't compile!

Sometimes things go wrong when compiling. Try the following before opening an issue:

1. Run make clean.
2. Run git clean -X -f -d.
3. Make sure you have the latest version of Rust nightly! (rustup.rs is recommended for managing Rust versions).
4. Update GNU Make, NASM and QEMU/VirtualBox.
5. Pull the upstream master branch (git remote add upstream git@github.com:redox-os/redox.git; git pull upstream master).
6. Update submodules (git submodule update --recursive --init).

and then rebuild!

Contributing to Redox

If you're interested in this project, and you'd like to help us out, here is a list of ways you can do just that.

Cloning, Building, and Running

Redox is big (even compressed)! So cloning Redox takes a lot of bandwidth, and (depending on your data plan) can be costly, so clone at your own risk!

Quick Setup

$ cd path/to/your/projects/folder/

# Run bootstrap setup
$ curl -sf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redox-os/redox/master/bootstrap.sh -o bootstrap.sh && bash -e bootstrap.sh

# Build Redox
$ make all

# Launch using QEMU
$ make qemu
# Launch using QEMU without using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine). Try if QEMU gives an error.
$ make qemu kvm=no

QEMU with KVM

To use QEMU with KVM (kernel-based virtual Machine), which is faster than without KVM, you need a CPU with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) or AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) support. Most systems have this disabled in the BIOS by default, so you may need to reboot and enable the feature in the BIOS.

Manual Setup

To manually clone, build and run Redox using a Linux host, run the following commands (with exceptions, be sure to read the comments):

$ cd path/to/your/projects/folder/

# HTTPS
$ git clone https://github.com/redox-os/redox.git --origin upstream --recursive
# SSH
$ git clone git@github.com:redox-os/redox.git --origin upstream --recursive

$ cd redox/

# Install/update dependencies
$ bash bootstrap.sh -d

# Install rustup.rs
$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

# Set override toolchain to nightly build
$ rustup override set nightly

# For successive builds start here. If this is your first build, just continue

# Update git submodules
$ git submodule update --recursive --init

# Build Redox
$ make all

# Launch using QEMU
$ make qemu
# Launch using QEMU without using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine). Try if QEMU gives an error.
$ make qemu kvm=no