Porting Strategy - Redox - Your Next(Gen) OS

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/9979951

Monday, February 12, 2024
Ribbon and Ron Williams write:

As Redox functionality becomes more complete, we have been working hard to get a wide variety of software working.

This post will cover our porting strategy for Linux/BSD programs.

We have ported the following games and emulators:

2048

ClassiCube
DevilutionX
DOSBox
eduke32
FreeCiv
Gigalomania
Hematite
Mednafen
Neverball
OpenJK
OpenTTD
PrBoom (Doom engine)
ScummVM
Space Cadet Pinball
and others.

Porting is a major part of the Redox development effort. We are using porting as a way to prioritize and validate Redox functionality.

Currently dozens of programs and many more libraries work. Our initial focus has been on porting Rust programs, but we also recognize the importance of supporting programs written in other languages.

In last year Ribbon began the porting of more than 1000 programs and libraries to Redox! They are still work-in-progress and many require customized cross-compilation scripts or improved library support. You can see them here.

With our recent change to a Linux-compatible path format, we have removed a major hurdle to supporting Linux applications. In the future we plan to expand our POSIX support, port more Rust crates and continue to improve Relibc.

Some thought is being given to virtual machines and Wine as possible mechanisms for running proprietary binaries and possibly even proprietary drivers. However, there are no specific plans for that capability at this time.

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