I hadn’t heard of this one before. Maybe I’ll slap it into a VM to see what it is all about.
Their marketing is terrible, though. On almost every page of the documentation you see “It is written in Rust!” How geeky can you get?
The normal user doesn’t give a rodent’s posterior if an OS was written in Assembly, Rust, or Babylonian incantations. The question is “what will it do for me that the other ones don’t?”
Like it or not, this is actually the main point of Redox.
Genode is based largely on L4-series microkernels. If a device driver is closed-source and runs in supervisor mode, you’d never be able to detect any of the nefarious activity it could be doing. It has access to every kernel function and every corner of the memory map. Since Redox is designed to be a Linux kernel competitor on servers and workstations, security is too important to leave to chance.
Part of me wonders whether the desire to see it succeed might have to do with its different licencing terms to Linux - MIT rather than the GPL. As far as I can tell, this (as well as the language) is the distinguishing feature between Redox and HURD, another microkernel to replace Linux as the core of the GNU system. Hurd of course stands for Hurd of Unix Replacing Daemons.
Actually the licencing is one of the things I like about Genode (AGPL licence). Whilst I used to be in favour of those very minimalist licences like BSD, my preference has in recent years changed more towards the more aggressively copyleft licencing. In fact I think licences should place more restrictions over the use that software is subsequently put to, but that is debate for another thread.