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Just curious, because I'd love to run redox for real one day :D, Is the biggest issue around real hardware support the drivers/firmware? Would it make sense / b

Just curious, because I'd love to run redox for real one day :D, Is the biggest issue around real hardware support the drivers/firmware? Would it make sense / be possible to reuse the Linux code?

dijit 5y ago
The biggest issue _I_ had as a user was getting redox to compile itself. It is fun as a toy but developing on it is difficult. Or I missed something.
- Macha 5y ago
  Yeah, I looked into it in the past couple of months. Ultimately it wouldn't compile because my system has GCC 11. They have a vendored copy of ring that's about 2 years out of date, and has some issue with array type confusion where a field is defined as a fixed length array in one field and a pointer in the other. Since GCC 11, that's been a warning, and their build system compiles their fork of ring with -Werror, so that new warning in GCC 11 breaks the build. Sadly their gitlab instance at the time was "email the dev to set up an account", so I just left it there.
  - est31 5y ago
    > Sadly their gitlab instance at the time was "email the dev to set up an account", so I just left it there. The Gitlab had a "sign in with Github" feature at least since August 2019, which is when I created my account there.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Well you ignored my question, if that counts as something.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Well the answer is no, you can't reuse kernel drivers and, no, that isn't the biggest barrier to adoption. Which is what I'm responding to. The biggest barrier to adoption is lack of a working compiler.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Would it make sense / be possible to reuse the Linux code? Linux is GPL-2.0 while RedoxOS is MIT licensed. You can't use Linux driver code without relicensing Redox as GPL-2.0. What you can do, however, is implement a Linux driver compatibility layer. Linux has NDISwrapper, which enables Linux to take advantage of Windows drivers for networking hardware. FreeBSD has Linux compatibility with linuxkpi and FreeBSD can use some Linux graphics drivers that way. You can also port the drivers and keep them out of Redox's MIT source tree, too. If you want to add drivers to Redox, you can do a clean room implementation by documenting how Linux interacts with the hardware it supports, and then writing drivers from those documents.

Just curious, because I'd love to run redox for real one day :D, Is the biggest issue around real hardware support the drivers/firmware? Would it make sense / be possible to reuse the Linux code?

dijit 5y ago

The biggest issue _I_ had as a user was getting redox to compile itself. It is fun as a toy but developing on it is difficult. Or I missed something.

Macha 5y ago
Yeah, I looked into it in the past couple of months. Ultimately it wouldn't compile because my system has GCC 11. They have a vendored copy of ring that's about 2 years out of date, and has some issue with array type confusion where a field is defined as a fixed length array in one field and a pointer in the other. Since GCC 11, that's been a warning, and their build system compiles their fork of ring with -Werror, so that new warning in GCC 11 breaks the build. Sadly their gitlab instance at the time was "email the dev to set up an account", so I just left it there.
- est31 5y ago
  > Sadly their gitlab instance at the time was "email the dev to set up an account", so I just left it there. The Gitlab had a "sign in with Github" feature at least since August 2019, which is when I created my account there.
nixpulvis 5y ago
Well you ignored my question, if that counts as something.
- dijit 5y ago
  Well the answer is no, you can't reuse kernel drivers and, no, that isn't the biggest barrier to adoption. Which is what I'm responding to. The biggest barrier to adoption is lack of a working compiler.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Would it make sense / be possible to reuse the Linux code? Linux is GPL-2.0 while RedoxOS is MIT licensed. You can't use Linux driver code without relicensing Redox as GPL-2.0. What you can do, however, is implement a Linux driver compatibility layer. Linux has NDISwrapper, which enables Linux to take advantage of Windows drivers for networking hardware. FreeBSD has Linux compatibility with linuxkpi and FreeBSD can use some Linux graphics drivers that way. You can also port the drivers and keep them out of Redox's MIT source tree, too. If you want to add drivers to Redox, you can do a clean room implementation by documenting how Linux interacts with the hardware it supports, and then writing drivers from those documents.