Rust-Written Redox OS Gets USB Keyboards and Mice Working | Hacker News Reader

Rust-Written Redox OS Gets USB Keyboards and Mice Working

phoronix.com

10 pointsscns3 comments

It's probably going to be awhile since Redox has any kind of market penetration, but I think it's pretty cool that someone is finally building a new OS that's getting some traction. It seems like most corporations are happy enough to adapt Linux or BSD for whatever it is they're doing, and that's certainly not an incompetent thing to do; Linux and BSD are well-tested and have driver support built in for most stuff and are relatively fast etc.

But it's sort of the curse of the "Good enough". Linux and BSD are cool but they're not perfect, and of course they'll never be perfect because nothing is. I think it's great that Redox is around, written primarily in a safer language, and appears to even be pulling off a microkernel. I haven't run it, and I probably won't for quite awhile, but I'm glad the effort exists.

A micro kernel you say? Interesting.. I remember in the past it was claimed that those would never be able to be as performant as macro kernels. But I also remember things like being able to install drivers without requiring a reboot and without needing to worry about it crashing your system either.

What do you you think is possible in a perfect operating system?

To be clear, I don't really do systems programming outside of playing with Arduino and FreeRTOS (if that even counts).

A perfect OS to me would allow as much as possible to be in the user space, even stuff that's traditionally done at the kernel space (e.g. drivers). I believe that microkernels make this easier, but I'm not sure; I know Redox advertises the ability to write drivers in userspace though.

I'm not sure how possible it would be, but it would be awesome if drivers could be easily written in high level language with garbage collection and the like.

I'd like pipes to be a bit more versatile, specifically I'd like to glue together arbitrary programs, and not just stuff from stdout. I want effectively every GUI program to be able to directly communicate with every other GUI program, and I would like it if programs didn't have to do much to support this (e.g. I don't just want a reinvention of OLE or something).

I'd like easier first-class support for RAM-based filesystem mounts; I know you can hack something together with tmpfs in Linux to get something like that, but I want to be able to quickly in my file manager make a folder that lives only in RAM.

That's a few things that I can think of; I believe something like this is possible within Plan 9/Inferno, so maybe I'm just reiterating what people mourn about that. Still, a guy can dream.

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