Red Bear OS

Microkernel operating system in Rust — based on Redox OS

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Red Bear OS is a derivative of Redox OS — a general-purpose, Unix-like, microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. It tracks upstream Redox, incorporating its improvements while adding custom drivers, filesystems, and hardware support.

What's New

• KDE bring-up moved forward: config/redbear-kde.toml exists, the Qt6 stack builds in-tree, and the KDE recipe tree is now populated.
• Native Red Bear runtime tooling expanded with redbear-info, redbear-hwutils (lspci, lsusb), and a Redox-native netctl flow.
• Build and status docs were refreshed to distinguish current in-tree progress from older historical roadmap text.

See CHANGELOG.md for the running user-visible change log.

The current public roadmap and execution model live in the Red Bear OS Implementation Plan.

Current Phase Snapshot

Phase	Status	Notes
P0 ACPI boot	✅ Complete	In-tree and documented in local/docs/ACPI-FIXES.md
P1 driver infra	✅ Complete	Compile-oriented infrastructure present
P2 DRM / display	✅ Code complete	Hardware validation still pending
P3 POSIX + input	🚧 In progress	relibc exports now cover the rebuilt signalfd/timerfd/eventfd/open_memstream consumer path; runtime validation remains
P4 Wayland runtime	🚧 Partial	libwayland and seatd now build, and KDE config starts seatd, but compositor/DRM/input runtime validation is still incomplete
P5 AMD accel / IOMMU	🚧 Partial	iommu daemon now builds, but hardware validation and full acceleration are still open
P6 KDE Plasma	🚧 In progress	Mix of real builds, shims, and stubs

There is no distinct first-class P7 phase artifact in this repository today; later work appears as milestone-style follow-on work beyond the tracked P6 boundary.

What's Different from Upstream Redox

Component	Status	Detail
AMD GPU driver (amdgpu)	✅ Compiles	LinuxKPI compat + AMD DC modesetting + MSI-X (no HW validation)
Intel GPU driver	✅ Compiles	Display pipe modesetting + MSI-X (no HW validation)
ext4 filesystem	✅ Compiles	Read/write ext4 alongside RedoxFS
ACPI for AMD bare metal	✅ Complete	x2APIC, MADT, FADT shutdown/reboot, power methods
Wired networking	🚧 Improved	native net stack present, Redox-native netctl shipped, RTL8125 autoload wired through the existing Realtek path
Custom branding	✅	Boot identity, hostname, os-release
POSIX gaps (relibc)	🚧 In progress	implementations exist in-tree; runtime validation against Wayland stack is still ongoing

Project Structure

├── config/           # Build configs (TOML) — desktop, minimal, redbear-*
├── recipes/          # Package recipes (~100+ packages, 26 categories)
├── mk/               # Makefile build orchestration
├── src/              # Cookbook Rust tool (repo binary, cook logic)
├── local/            # ← Red Bear OS custom work (survives upstream updates)
│   ├── patches/      #   Kernel, base, relibc patches
│   ├── recipes/      #   Custom packages (drivers, GPU, system, branding)
│   ├── scripts/      #   sync-upstream.sh, apply-patches.sh
│   ├── Assets/       #   Branding (icon, boot background)
│   └── docs/         #   Integration documentation
├── docs/             # Architecture guides
├── scripts/          # Helper scripts
└── Makefile          # Root build orchestrator

Build

Requires a Linux x86_64 host with Rust nightly, QEMU, and standard build tools. See the Redox Build Instructions for full prerequisites.

make all CONFIG_NAME=redbear-full        # Full desktop + custom drivers
make all CONFIG_NAME=redbear-minimal     # Minimal server
make live CONFIG_NAME=redbear-full       # Live ISO (redbear-live.iso)
make qemu                                # Boot in QEMU

Native hardware listing tools

Red Bear configs now include a small native redbear-hwutils package that ships lspci and lsusb. lspci reads the existing /scheme/pci/.../config surface, while lsusb walks the native usb.* schemes exposed by xhcid, so there is no dependency on the unfinished WIP pciutils or usbutils ports.

Networking

Red Bear ships the existing native Redox wired networking path (pcid-spawner → NIC daemon → smolnetd/dhcpd/netcfg) together with a small Redox-native netctl compatibility command. Profiles live under /etc/netctl, the shipped examples live under /etc/netctl/examples, and the boot service applies the enabled profile with netctl --boot.

RTL8125 is wired into the existing native Realtek autoload path by matching 10ec:8125 in the rtl8168d driver config. This keeps the implementation in the Redox userspace driver model rather than introducing a separate Linux netdevice compatibility layer.

Runtime diagnostics

Red Bear ships redbear-info as the canonical runtime integration/debugging command. It is a passive report over live system surfaces and is intended to help answer questions like:

• which Red Bear integrations are merely installed versus actually active,
• whether the networking stack is up, with current IP, DNS, and default route,
• whether hardware discovery surfaces such as PCI, USB, DRM, and RTL8125 are visible.

Use redbear-info --verbose for evidence-backed human output, redbear-info --json for machine- readable diagnostics, and redbear-info --test for suggested follow-up commands.

Sync with Upstream Redox

./local/scripts/sync-upstream.sh              # Rebase onto latest Redox
./local/scripts/sync-upstream.sh --dry-run    # Preview conflicts first

The local/ directory is never touched by upstream updates. Recipe patches for kernel and base are symlinked from local/patches/ — protected from make clean and make distclean.

Resources

• Upstream Redox website
• Redox Book
• Hardware Support
• Contributing

AI Policy

We welcome contributions made with the assistance of LLMs and AI tools. If you use AI to help write code, documentation, or patches, that's great — we care about the quality of the result, not how it was produced.

License

MIT — same as upstream Redox OS.