The Rust-based open-source operating system Redox OS had a very eventful September as they outlined in a status update published this weekend.
Redox OS developers continue making great strides in this from-scratch Rust operating system. Attracting my interest in their latest developments, a number of performance optimizations.
Redox OS now supports direct context switching as a means to bypass the scheduler when an application is invoking a system service. Redox's scheduler was using the expensive BTreeMap data structure for context switching that is rather expensive. Avoiding this usage reduced IPC latency by a reported 24% and improved I/O performance by around 5% for small buffers.
Redox OS also reduced kernel TLB usage to provide some nice gains in different areas, including reduced TLB misses by 75%.
Avoiding unnecessary AVX register saves/restores reduced IPC latency by another 14%.
Also on the performance side is better SDL2 performance.
Some other recent work on Redox OS includes external display hot-plugging for Intel Tiger Lake GPUs, boot fixes, upgrading against Rust uutils 0.11, and LLVM Clang support in the Redox build system for cross-compilation support. There were also a variety of other kernel and driver improvements with this version.
More details on the many exciting changes to Redox OS during September 2026 can be found via today's blog post.