--- title: "This Month in Redox - August 2026" slug: this-month-in-redox-august-2026 url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/this-month-in-redox-august-2026 canonical_url: https://www.redox-os.org/news/this-month-260831/ content_type: changelog language: en published_at: 2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z updated_at: 2026-09-27T00:17:57.960Z author: "Redox OS Team" authored_by: human publisher: "Redox OS" publisher_url: https://www.redox-os.org/ topics: ["Open Source", "Rust", "Systems Programming"] license: all-rights-reserved word_count: 2040 reading_minutes: 9 citation: "Redox OS Team, Redox OS. \"This Month in Redox - August 2026.\" 31 Aug 2026. https://www.redox-os.org/news/this-month-260831/ (all-rights-reserved)" # The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers # to the source above; quote the citation and link the canonical URL. --- # This Month in Redox - August 2026 > # This Month in Redox - August 2026 ##### By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Redox OS is a complete Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. August was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news. Sorry for the delayed report, a combination of busy development, time off, conference attendance, other work, and various random factors got in the way. ## Donate to Redox If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch! - Donate - Patreon - Merch has moved from Teespring to Amaze Commerce:… # This Month in Redox - August 2026 ##### By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Redox OS is a complete Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. August was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news. Sorry for the delayed report, a combination of busy development, time off, conference attendance, other work, and various random factors got in the way. ## Donate to Redox If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch! - Donate - Patreon - Merch has moved from Teespring to Amaze Commerce: https://app.amazecommerce.com/shop/redox-os ## More Boot Fixes Wildan Mubarok improved UEFI compatibility, which allowed the MSI Modern 14 C7M laptop to boot! ## ARM64 Multi-core Support lbecher implemented multi-core support for AArch64/ARM64, and made some fixes. More testing need to done to determine the extent of the performance improvements. ## Ring Buffer Communication For More Parallelism After some months of work Ibuki Omatsu and Anhad Singh implemented a userspace-based ring buffer communication API (Redox Rings) equivalent to Linux io_uring system call API to improve performance on supported drivers, with guidance from 4lDO2 and help from Wildan Mubarok to fix bugs. Which is better than the previous attempt from years ago to implement a kernel-based ring buffer communication API. This work improves the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS and RAMFS by a significant factor. In the benchmark below (bypassing the RedoxFS file system) it’s measured to improve I/O performance by 14-15x!! - `redox_syscall` (using synchronous system calls to measure NVMe read/write performance) and`redox_ring` (using ring buffers to measure NVMe read/write performance) benchmark comparison - In-memory filesystem (ramfs) benchmark using ring buffers ## Significant Native Compilation Performance Improvement and OOM Fixes After months of investigation by Wildan Mubarok on gradual GCC compilation performance degradation, he found and fixed a kernel memory leak that was causing the `os-test` test suite compilation time in GCC (on QEMU) to increase from 2 hours up to 10 hours, and causing out of memory (OOM) errors. Once fixed, the compilation time was reduced from 10 hours to around 30 minutes. ## NUMA Support Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) implemented the initial support for NUMA-based memory management. As we currently use QEMU to test NUMA behaviour, any help to test on real hardware would be much appreciated. He also implemented local node allocation (locality of data) by default and a `libredox` API to modify NUMA allocation policies. ## Process Priority Support and The Conclusion of the Scheduler Improvements RSoC project Akshit Gaur implemented support for process priorities and did system priority tuning, which improved general performance. He also wrote the last EEVDF article giving the complete explanation after optimizations. Thanks a lot Akshit for the great work! ## QEMU on Redox! Ribbon and Wildan Mubarok confirmed/tested that QEMU is working on Redox. Ribbon tested the server variant of Redox in QEMU terminal mode and Wildan tested the desktop variant including the GTK frontend. Redox does not yet have support for KVM-like virtual machine acceleration, so performance can be significantly slow. - Redox server variant on QEMU terminal mode above Redox desktop - Redox server variant on both QEMU terminal and GTK GUI - Redox desktop variant on QEMU GTK GUI ## Dual-boot Installation from Linux! Wildan Mubarok improved the Linux support of Redox installer to allow a dual-boot installation of Redox, you can see this page to learn how to use it and the new GUI installer options. - Redox running on triple-boot ## Kernel Binary Size Profiling 4lDO2 implemented support for kernel binary size profiling to measure where it can be reduced, also reducing memory usage. ## Current File Access Design using Namespaces and Capability-based Security Ibuki Omatsu created a diagram that summarizes how the `openat` function is used to resolve paths, using the namespace manager, as part of capability-based security. Read this section for more details. ## Better relibc Contribution Philosophy and Goals 4lDO2 documented the `relibc` safety philosophy and goals (for our POSIX/C Standard Library) to reduce the probability of undefined behavior and logic bugs being introduced. This primarily focuses on restricting unsafe code to the “leaf functions” of `relibc` for better oversight/review and less unsafe code in unexpected places. It also includes using more Rust-like error handling internally, to give more information than POSIX errors (easing the investigation of certain classes of bugs). ## Kernel Improvements - (kernel) 4lDO2 reduced IPC overhead by 5% - (kernel) 4lDO2 reduced binary size by 2.2% by removing DTB code when not reached (x86-64 image, for example) - (kernel) 4lDO2 merged the `redox_syscall` library code into the`kernel` repository to ease changes - (kernel) Akshit Gaur did more improvements and fixes to EEVDF scheduler work stealing and Wildan Mubarok did some fixes, which improved performance - (kernel) Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) improved memory deallocation performance by reducing thread locking - (kernel) Aadarsh (aka EuclidDivisionLemma) fixed a panic in NUMA code - (kernel) Wildan Mubarok moved all scheme path handling to user-space - (kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed a potential bug where process killing could create zombie processes - (kernel) Wildan Mubarok fixed a panic in `FUTEX_WAIT64` system call ## Driver Improvements - (driver) MJ Pooladkhay implemented PCI multi-vector MSI-X support, which will allow more driver performance features - (driver) MJ Pooladkhay fixed VirtIO device completions being lost - (driver) Wildan Mubarok fixed a `pcid` bug that Clippy detected - (driver) bjorn3 did some code deduplication and cleanup ## System Improvements - (sys) Ibuki Omatsu implemented multi-threading support for schemes - (sys) Wildan Mubarok ported rldd to be our `ldd` tool implementation - (sys) Wildan Mubarok improved the scheme path parent gathering performance - (sys) Wildan Mubarok fixed some off-by-one file locking bugs, which helped SQLite and `libsoup` - (sys) Wildan Mubarok removed a `inputd` non-fatal panic when no display is available - (sys) bjorn3 fixed potential `inputd` deadlocks - (sys) bjorn3 did some code deduplication ## Relibc Improvements - (libc) 4lDO2 moved most of unsafe socket and `getaddrinfo` function code to leaf functions to reduce bugs by using concentration for much better readability - (libc) 4lDO2 implemented the `RELIBC_COMMIT_HASH` environment variable to show the`relibc` commit hash to fully confirm if static objects were updated with local changes or up-to-date - (libc) Ibuki Omatsu fixed broken `SCM_RIGHTS` on`recvmsg` function, a bug that was revealed after file descriptor allocation migration to user-space - (libc) bjorn3 fixed the `getsockname` and`getpeername` functions address length computation, which fixed some`mio` library tests - (libc) Wildan Mubarok implemented the `rlct_clone` function for Linux to fix`pthread` tests on Linux ARM64 - (libc) Wildan Mubarok implemented mode read (except line buffering) and write (except borrowing) support and handling in `setvbuf` function - (libc) Wildan Mubarok improved the `LD_DEBUG` environment variable to show the`relibc` shared object memory location range to greatly improve crash debugging on dynamic linking - (libc) Wildan Mubarok improved `epoll` performance by calling the`open` function directly - (libc) Wildan Mubarok reduced application and library launch time by using constant functions in `stdio` initialization - (libc) Wildan Mubarok reduced unsafe Rust code in `timer_t` - (libc) Wildan Mubarok added more Unix socket tests - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed TLS load offset on ARM64, which fixed a `tokio` library panic on package manager - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed 64KiB-paged ELF loading on Linux ARM64 - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed the `clock_getres` function behavior - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed a double close bug in `fstatat` function - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed NUL offset in `ptsname_r` - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed the `pthread_kill-self` test - (libc) Wildan Mubarok fixed a time/timer test - (libc) auronandace implemented `tcgetsid` function - (libc) auronandace replaced `SYS_DUP_INTO` ,`SYS_READ` , and`SYS_WRITE` system calls with`SYS_CALL` system call to reduce system calls - (libc) auronandace reduced more `as` casting usage to prevent problems in code refactorings - (libc) auronandace did some code cleanup - (libc) auronandace, Wildan Mubarok, and Ibuki Omatsu fixed and enforced many Clippy lints and enabled tracking them on CI - (libc) Ben McCann implemented POSIX base in `tzset` and POSIX handling in`mktime` functions - (libc) Ben McCann added more tests to `tzset` function - (libc) Sunam Kang implemented `MSG_NOSIGNAL` in`sendto` function ## Networking Improvements - (net) Wildan Mubarok improved DHCP missing DNS error handling messages ## RedoxFS Improvements - (rfs) Wildan Mubarok implemented `O_SYMLINK` to allow symlink traversal across schemes - (rfs) Wildan Mubarok improved partition mount error handling to show error codes ## Security Improvements - (safe) bjorn3 implemented rootless display opening on `inputd` - (safe) Ibuki Omatsu reimplemented the `contain` sandbox management tool to use the new namespace management, which now creates a per-process filter scheme that holds an actual namespace file descriptor, mediating all`openat` function calls by providing a file descriptor filter to programs (full`chroot` implementation is still WIP) - (safe) Wildan Mubarok updated the CA certificates to be up-to-date, which also fixed GnuTLS ## Packaging Improvements - (pkg) Wildan Mubarok fixed a double counting bug in package extraction progress bar ## Desktop Improvements - (desk) bjorn3 ported the Orbital login manager to `winit` and`softbuffer` libraries to allow Wayland testing in the future - (desk) bjorn3 disabled window decorations in fullscreen Orbital windows - (desk) bjorn3 fixed fullscreen or maximized Orbital window resize on display resize ## Installer Improvements - (install) Wildan Mubarok fixed the input data handling of new GUI installer options - (install) Wildan Mubarok added a progress status when extracting packages ## Programs - (app) Wildan Mubarok updated GNU nano from version 7.2 to 9.2 - (app) Aadarsh fixed the GNU Binutils GDB variant compilation - (app) Wildan Mubarok updated the Kibi from version 0.3.2 to 0.3.3 - (app) Wildan Mubarok fixed WebKit TLS bugs - (app) Wildan Mubarok fixed the EGL support on GTK3 port - (app) Wildan Mubarok fixed EGL partial rendering on Mesa3D ## Testing Improvements - (test) 4lDO2 implemented benchmark metrics on `acid` test suite to detect performance regressions - (test) Wildan Mubarok started to use and enable Clippy on CI - (test) Wildan Mubarok reduced the Redox image CI verification time from around 25 minutes to around 7 minutes ## Build System Improvements - (build) Wildan Mubarok updated the Cookbook recipe target list item combination to allow `--all-*` options usage, for example:`make r.base,--all-binaries` - (build) Wildan Mubarok implemented the `COOKBOOK_TREELESS_CLONE` environment variable to enable treeless clone in all recipes to greatly save storage space and and reduce download time - (build) Wildan Mubarok reimplemented most of script logic in Cookbook to reduce script maintenance cost and Ribbon fixed some regressions - (build) Wildan Mubarok fixed the `make rebuild-push` command (verify recipe source or package changes, incrementally rebuild or download and push new changes) not updating the filesystem configuration recipes, now the system can be properly and quickly updated in a existing Redox filesystem image - (build) Konstantin Shabanov fixed the Nix flake on Podman and Native builds - (build) Konstantin Shabanov applied `cargo fix` on code - (build) Ribbon replaced the `ls` tool by`tree` in`show-package.sh` script to make it much more useful by showing all recipe package directories and files ## Documentation Improvements - (doc) Wildan Mubarok updated and improved the Installing Redox page with information for the new GUI installer options - (doc) Ribbon properly documented with more detail why we prefer POSIX/Linux source compatibility over binary compatibility on Developer FAQ - (doc) Ribbon documented the debugging tip that Linux KVM usage change bug behavior ## Website Improvements - (web) Wildan Mubarok added LaTeX math support and improved the website dark mode to clearly show LaTeX formulas to fix the formulas in the last EEVDF article ## How To Test The Changes To test the changes of this month download the `server` or `desktop` variants of the daily images. Use the `desktop` variant for a graphical interface. If you prefer a terminal-style interface, or if the `desktop` variant doesn’t work, please try the `server` variant. - If you want to test in a virtual machine use the “harddrive” images - If you want to test on real hardware use the “livedisk” images Read the following pages to learn how to use the images in a virtual machine or real hardware: Sometimes the daily images are outdated and you need to build Redox from source. For instructions on how to do this, read the Building Redox page. ### Programs To test the changes on applications and libraries, see if the wanted program is available in the following lists and run the following command to install them: `sudo pkg install package-name` There’s also a package web interface if you want detailed package information: ## Join us on Matrix Chat If you want to contribute, give feedback or just listen in to the conversation, join us on Matrix Chat.