Redox runs on RISC-V, boots to GUI login on Raspberry Pi 4

Another month lies behind us, so another monthly update from Redox is upon us. The biggest piece of news this time is undoubtedly that Redox now runs on RISC-V – a major achievement.

Andrey Turkin has done extensive work on RISC-V support in the kernel, toolchain and elsewhere. Thanks very much Andrey for the excellent work!

Jeremy Soller has incorporated RISC-V support into the toolchain and build process, has begun some refactoring of the kernel and device drivers to better handle all the supported architectures, and has gotten the Orbital Desktop working when running in QEMU.
↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams

That’s not all, though. Redox on the Raspberry Pi 4 boots to the GUI login screen, but needs more work on especially USB support to become a fully usable target. The application store from the COSMIC desktop environment has been ported, and as part of this effort, Redox also adopted FreeDesktop standards to make package installation easier – and it just makes sense to do so, with more and more of COSMIC making its way to Redox.

Of course, there’s also a slew of smaller improvements to the kernel, various drivers including the ACPI driver, RedoxFS, Relibc, and a lot more. The progress Redox is making is astounding, and while that’s partly because it’s easier to make progress when there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit as there inevitably will be in a relatively new operating system, it’s still quite an achievement. I feel very positive about the future of Redox, and I can’t wait until it reaches a point where more general purpose use becomes viable.