Influences

This page explains how Redox was influenced by other operating systems.

(The list is ordered by influence level)

Minix

The most influential Unix-like system with a microkernel. It has advanced features such as system modularity, kernel panic resistence, driver reincarnation, protection against bad drivers and secure interfaces for process comunication.

Redox is largely influenced by Minix - it has a similar architecture but with a feature set written in Rust.

• How Minix influenced the Redox design

seL4

The most performant and simplest microkernel of the world.

Redox follow the same principle, trying to make the kernel-space small as possible (moving components to user-space and reducing the number of system calls, passing the complexity to user-space) and keeping the overall performance good (reducing the context switch cost).

Plan 9

This Bell Labs OS brings the concept of "Everything is a File" to the highest level, doing all the system communication from the filesystem.

• Drew DeVault explains the Plan 9
• Plan 9's influence on Redox

Linux

The most advanced monolithic kernel and biggest open-source project of the world. It brought several improvements and optimizations to the Unix-like world.

Redox tries to implement the Linux performance improvements in a microkernel design.

BSD

This Unix family included several improvements on Unix systems and the open-source variants of BSD added many improvements to the original system (like Linux did).

• FreeBSD - The Capsicum (a capability-based system) and jails (a sandbox technology) influenced the Redox namespaces implementation.

• OpenBSD - The system call, filesystem, display server and audio server sandbox and others influenced the Redox security.