Redox gets services management, completes userspace process manager

Can someone please stop these months from coming and going, because I’m getting dizzy with yet another monthly report of all the progress made by Redox. Aside from the usual swath of improvements to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and so on, this month saw the completion of the userspace process manager.

In monolithic kernels this management is done in the kernel, resulting in necessary ambient authority, and possibly constrained interfaces if a stable ABI is to be guaranteed. With this userspace implementation, it will be easier to manage access rights using capabilities, reduce kernel bugs by keeping it simpler, and make changes where both sides of the interface can be updated simultaneously.
↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams

Students at Georgia Tech have been hard at work this winter on Redox as well, building a system health monitoring and recovery daemon and user interface. The Redox team has also done a lot of work to improve the build infrastructure, fixing a number of related issues along the way. The sudo daemon has now replaced the setuid bit for improved user authentication security, and a ton of existing ports have been fixed and updated where needed.

Redox’ monthly progress is kind of stunning, and it’s clear there’s a lot of interesting in the Rust-based operating system from outside the project itself as well. I wonder at what point Redox becomes usable for at least some daily, end-user tasks. I think it’s not quite there yet, especially when it comes to hardware support, but I feel like it’s getting there faster than anyone anticipated.