Red Bear OS

A microkernel operating system written in Rust, derived from Redox OS

---

What is Red Bear OS?

Red Bear OS is a general-purpose, Unix-like operating system with a microkernel architecture, written in Rust. It is a full fork of Redox OS, frozen at release 0.1.0, with added hardware support, filesystem drivers, and a KDE Plasma desktop path.

Goals:

• AMD & Intel parity — first-class support for both platforms on bare metal
• KDE Plasma desktop — Wayland-based desktop environment via the KWin compositor
• Hardware GPU acceleration — AMD GPU (amdgpu) and Intel GPU drivers via redox-drm
• Modern subsystems — USB, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, ext4, GRUB, D-Bus
• Offline-first builds — reproducible from archived, BLAKE3-verified sources

Our Git Server

Red Bear OS lives on a self-hosted Gitea instance at https://gitea.redbearos.org. This is the canonical home for the fork — there is no GitHub / GitLab / Codeberg mirror that is authoritative.

Field	Value
Host	https://gitea.redbearos.org
User	vasilito
Token	(session-only — never stored in repo)
Web UI	https://gitea.redbearos.org/vasilito
Main repo	https://gitea.redbearos.org/vasilito/RedBear-OS

Token policy. The vasilito token is a per-session credential and must never be committed to any tracked file. Use git credential.helper (store / cache / libsecret), ~/.netrc, or $REDBEAR_GITEA_TOKEN env var. See local/AGENTS.md § Our Git Server for the full operator runbook, mirror list, API reference, and recovery procedure.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

Linux x86_64 host with Rust nightly, QEMU, nasm, and standard build tools.
See the Redox Build Guide for full setup.

Build & Run

# Clone (read-only)
git clone https://gitea.redbearos.org/vasilito/RedBear-OS.git
cd RedBear-OS

# Authenticated clone (one-off) — supply token via env var, not literal here
git clone https://vasilito:${REDBEAR_GITEA_TOKEN}@gitea.redbearos.org/vasilito/RedBear-OS.git

# Recommended: use the Red Bear wrapper
./local/scripts/build-redbear.sh redbear-mini     # Text-only target
./local/scripts/build-redbear.sh redbear-full     # Desktop-capable target

# Boot in QEMU with the resulting image
make qemu

Build script: local/scripts/build-redbear.sh is the canonical entry point. Bare make all works but bypasses the .config checking and REDBEAR_ALLOW_PROTECTED_FETCH=1 gates that build-redbear.sh enforces. See AGENTS.md § Build Commands for full details.

Public Scripts

Script	Purpose
local/scripts/build-redbear.sh	Canonical build wrapper for redbear-mini/full/grub
scripts/run.sh	Build and run in QEMU (-b to build, -c <config> for target)
scripts/build-iso.sh	Build a live ISO for bare-metal boot
scripts/build-all-isos.sh	Build all live ISO targets
scripts/network-boot.sh	PXE network boot helper
scripts/dual-boot.sh	Dual-boot installation helper

Config Targets

Target	Type	Description
redbear-full	Desktop	Wayland + KDE + GPU drivers + D-Bus services
redbear-mini	Console	Text-only recovery / install target
redbear-grub	Console	Text-only with GRUB boot manager

Current Status

Red Bear OS boots to a login prompt in QEMU with working wired networking, D-Bus system bus, hardware detection daemons, and filesystem support (RedoxFS, ext4, FAT).

Area	Status
Boot (ACPI/x2APIC/SMP)	✅ Bare-metal proven
Userspace drivers (PCI, storage, net)	✅ Working in QEMU
D-Bus system bus + services	✅ Working (login1, PolicyKit, UDisks, UPower)
ext4 / FAT filesystems	✅ Compiles, installer-wired
POSIX gaps (relibc)	🚧 Bounded Wayland-facing support
DRM/KMS display drivers	🚧 AMD + Intel compile; HW validation pending
Wayland compositor	🚧 Bounded proof; Qt6/KF6 clients crash at init
KDE Plasma desktop	🔄 In progress (Qt6/KF6 compile; KWin/QML blocked)
Wi‑Fi / Bluetooth	📋 Planned (architected, implementation pending)

How It Works

Red Bear OS uses a userspace driver model — all drivers run as unprivileged daemons:

Kernel (microkernel)
  └── schemes: memory, irq, event, pipe, debug
        └── Driver daemons (userspace)
              ├── pcid        → PCI enumeration
              ├── e1000d      → Intel ethernet
              ├── xhcid       → USB controller
              └── vesad       → Display framebuffer

The kernel provides minimal services (memory, interrupts, IPC). Everything else — filesystems, networking, graphics, input — runs in userspace.

Documentation

• Implementation Plan — roadmap and execution model
• Desktop Path Plan — kernel → DRM → Mesa → Wayland → KDE
• D-Bus Integration — session bus architecture
• USB Plan — USB stack design
• Wi‑Fi Plan — wireless architecture
• Bluetooth Plan — BT stack design
• Documentation Index — full doc map

Contributing

Red Bear OS uses a full fork model. Upstream Redox sources are frozen and archived. All custom work lives in local/:

local/
├── patches/    # Durable changes to upstream source trees
├── recipes/    # Custom packages (drivers, GPU, system)
├── docs/       # Integration and planning docs
└── scripts/    # Build, test, and release tooling

We welcome contributions made with or without AI assistance — we care about quality, not how the code was produced.

License

MIT — same as upstream Redox OS.