Rust-Written Redox OS Gets USB Keyboards & Mice Working

Redox OS as the from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system had a successful April with now having USB keyboards and mice now working with their USB HID driver.

The Redox OS project published their April 2024 status report to highlight the advancements made over the past several weeks.

Among the recent changes to Redox OS are adjusting GCC to build static binaries by default on the platform, reworking the USB HID driver to complete USB keyboard and mouse support, Redox OS under ARM64 with QEMU can now run their Orbital desktop (still to be accomplished on real hardware), enhancing their kernel's futex implementation, documentation improvements, and other changes.

While USB keyboards and mice can now work with the latest Redox OS, there is currently a small performance penalty for USB input devices due to the driver using polling. USB hubs are also not well supported yet on Redox OS so there is the possibility of issues there too. But they seem to be outpacing GNU Hurd where at last check they still lacked USB support.

More details on the recent progress to Redox OS can be found via this month's status report on Redox-OS.org.