this-month-240831.md

title = "This Month in Redox - August 2024"
author = "Ribbon and Ron Williams"
date = "2024-08-31"

August was pretty exciting 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
• Patreon
• Merch

Massive Performance Improvement On Virtual Machines

Thanks to the recent kernel profilling implementation 4lDO2 discovered that the system time was triggering a context switch to get the host system time per second and sync, causing a big bottleneck in all tasks of the system. This context switch was disabled by using paravirtualization on TSC using KVM.

Thus all system tasks have a much better performance now, from more IO throughput to network speed. We are making benchmarks to determine the scale of this improvement.

This improvement is not applicable to Redox running on real hardware, however.

Redox is becoming faster than Linux in some virtual machine workloads (with all exploit mitigations disabled, apples-to-apples comparison), more exciting optimizations are coming.

Testing Redox

The past few weeks we have been working on polishing Redox a bit, tweaking VM performance, squashing some bugs and ensuring the new signals and process lifecycle code is working smoothly. First impressions are important, and we continue to do our best to improve the Redox experience.

System Improvements

bjorn3 updated most system components to use the new scheme path format, as we continue to move towards POSIX-compatible paths.

Relibc Improvements

• bjorn3 removed all code using the legacy scheme path format (URL paths)
• 4lDO2 added fixes on the forkpty and dprintf tests

VirtualBox

Ribbon documented the instructions to run the Redox image on VirtualBox. See the instructions in the book if you want to try it out.

Programs

Perl 5 has been ported to Redox (at least partly)! Perl uses a complicated build system, but contributor Bendeguz Pisch (bpisch) managed to conquer it! We still have some challenges with dynamic library support, but basic perl scripting is now possible on Redox.