Merge branch 'july-report' into 'master'

Add the July 2024 report

See merge request redox-os/website!400

content/news/this-month-240731.md

++++
+title = "This Month in Redox - July 2024"
+author = "Ribbon and Ron Williams"
+date = "2024-07-31"
++++
+
+July was a very exciting month for Redox! Here's all the latest news.
+
+## Donate to Redox
+
+If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch!
+
+- [Donate](https://www.redox-os.org/donate/)
+- [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/redox_os)
+- [Merch](https://redox-os.creator-spring.com/)
+
+## Servo and Redox Proposal for NGI Sargasso
+
+[Servo](https://servo.org/) and Redox have partnered for a joint application for funding by [NGI Sargasso](https://ngisargasso.eu/)!
+
+The proposed project includes porting SpiderMonkey and WebRender to Redox,
+improvements to Servo's cross-compilation support, and a written-in-Rust font stack.
+The application was submitted for NGI Sargasso's Open Call 4, and we await their response.
+
+Thanks to [Igalia](https://www.igalia.com/) and the Servo team for partnering with us!
+
+## NLnet Redox Signals project
+
+The funding for the [Redox OS Unix-style Signals](https://nlnet.nl/project/RedoxOS-Signals/) project has been finalized!
+As part of the [NGI Zero Core Fund](https://nlnet.nl/core), NLnet will be donating 26,500 EUR,
+covering implementation of POSIX-style signals and process lifecycle management in userspace.
+
+4lDO2 has moved the bulk of the signal handling code into our libc alternative, `relibc`.
+He has also implemented a large chunk of process lifecycle management,
+so Redox now handles the Session/Process Group/Process/Thread hierarchy more correctly.
+One area that has shown lots of improvement is the handling of thread and process exit.
+Some programs that were hanging on exit are now exiting cleanly;
+this is most notable for build tools, including Cargo.
+
+You can read about some of this work in his recent news post, [Towards userspaceification of POSIX - part I](https://www.redox-os.org/news/kernel-11/).
+
+## Web Servers
+
+Redox now has a working web server!
+
+[Simple HTTP Server](https://github.com/TheWaWaR/simple-http-server) is an advanced HTTP web server written in Rust.
+Contributor Bendeguz Pisch has gotten the server to work and has successfully served a website.
+
+He is also improving the Apache HTTP Server port.
+
+## Self-Hosting Update
+
+We finally successfully built Hello World programs in Rust, C and C++ inside of Redox!
+
+4lDO2 also fixed Cargo and built a Hello World program from it.
+
+It's a first step to test the compilation of more complex programs inside of Redox.
+
+## Kernel Improvements
+
+Andrey Turkin improved the ARM64 code on the kernel, and fixed some of the debug code.
+
+## UEFI Improvements
+
+bjorn3 fixed a violation of the UEFI specification (calling runtime services with interrupts enabled) and added workarounds for buggy firmware.
+
+These changes will allow more computers to boot Redox.
+
+## Userspace Improvements
+
+- bjorn3 updated most system daemons to use the new scheme format.
+
+## Driver Improvements
+
+- bjorn3 fixed an undefined bahvior bug on the ps2d driver's vmmouse implementation.
+- 4lDO2 fixed a panic on the inputd driver and updated the dependencies of all drivers.
+- The contributor Ramla Ijaz fixed some bugs.
+- bjorn3 updated most drivers to use the new scheme format.
+- bjorn3 did a cleanup of the graphics subsystem and ran `rustfmt` on the entire code.
+
+## Relibc Improvements
+
+- 4lDO2 moved the POSIX singals implementation from the kernel to relibc and added stubs for the `setresuid` and `setresgid` functions.
+- The contributor Derick Eddington fixed four incorrectness bugs on relibc.
+- The contributor plimkilde refactored the `rand48` functions to reduce unsafe code.
+- plimkilde improved the `random_bool()` function by adding the missing modulo.
+
+## Programs
+
+wget is finally working thanks to 4lDO2 and Ribbon!
+
+Now COSMIC Terminal and Nushell can exit properly.
+
+- 4lDO2 fixed most known bugs on the COSMIC programs
+- Ron Williams fixed the Helix text editor.
+- bjorn3 converted the Orbital recipes to TOML, fixing the "desktop-minimal" variant.
+- Ribbon converted more recipes to TOML to remove obsolete and broken code from our package system.
+
+More exciting Rust programs were packaged as usual.
+
+## Orbital Improvements
+
+- Ribbon configured Orbital to launch the FFMPEG media player (ffplay) when video and audio files are opened from graphical programs.
+
+## Build System Improvements
+
+- bjorn3 updated the system configuration on the filesystem configuration to use the new scheme format.
+- bjorn3 converted the standalone Orbital recipes to TOML.
+- bjorn3 improved the driver development experience by adding a symbolic link to the `drivers` code in the `drivers-initfs` recipe.
+This eliminates the duplication of the source tree of the `drivers` recipe,
+so any driver changes/debug code will appear in both the regular and `initfs` versions automatically.
+- Ribbon improved the `dev.toml` filesystem configuration to improve our tests inside of Redox, like self-hosting compilation.
+- Ribbon renamed the `vga` and `efi` QEMU options to `gpu` and `uefi`, to avoid confusion with the VGA interface (the `vga` option on QEMU to select the video type) and the old UEFI revision (the final revision of EFI is called UEFI)
+- Ribbon enabled the `shell` data type to easily change the default terminal shell before boot.
+- Ribbon updated the GCC and LLVM package versions for the MacOSX target, GCC was updated from versions 4.9/7.x to 14.x and LLVM from 16 to 18.
+
+## Other Improvements
+
+- The contributor ids1024 fixed the strace compilation without the "advanced" feature flag.
+- Andrey Turkin fixed the warnings on the redox_liner crate.
+
+## Documentation
+
+A list of the improvements this month:
+
+- The contributor Deft Punk improved the wording and grammar of the book.
+- Now the book recommends the [Gentoo](https://gentoo.org) package documentation for dependency configuration on recipes and [FreeBSD](https://freebsd.org) to find C/C++ feature flags easily. The Gentoo dependency classification helps a lot with not/poorly documented C/C++ programs and libraries.
+- The "Weekly Images" section was renamed "Daily Images" on the "Running Redox in a virtual machine" and "Running Redox on real hardware" pages, it was called "weekly" because breaking changes stopped the image update for weeks, but they are configured to be created daily.
+- Some sections of the website FAQ were copied to the book, it improved the reading and information distribution (to make things easier to find).
+- The "Scripts" section on the "Build System" page was improved, a command was added to sort in alpahbetical order the output of the include-recipes.sh script, it will save time from packagers adding recipes to the package build server configuration.
+- Now the website and book READMEs recommend the [lychee](https://lychee.cli.rs/) tool to verify broken links
+- Now the website READMEs has instructions to install [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/)
+- Ribbon added explanation comments on most configuration files of the build system.
+- Wildan Murdock copied the instructions to build a recipe with relibc on the relibc README.
+- Ribbon did a big cleanup of the comments on the configuration files of the build system.
+- Ribbon updated the screenshots of the `redox` repository README.
+
+## Website Improvements
+
+- Now the Home page is clear that we aim to be a complete Linux/BSD alternative.
+- The RedoxFS section context on the FAQ was fixed.
+- Some sections of the FAQ were improved.
+
+## Join us on Matrix Chat
+
+If you want to contribute, give feedback or just listen in to the conversation,
+join us on [Matrix Chat](https://matrix.to/#/#redox-join:matrix.org).