Hardware Support

There are billions of devices with hundreds of models and architectures in the world. We try to write drivers for the most used devices to support more people. Support depends on the specific hardware, since some drivers are device-specific and others are architecture-specific.

Have a look at the HARDWARE.md document to see all tested computers.

CPU

  • Intel - 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i686) from Pentium II and after with limitations.
  • AMD - 64-bit (AMD64) and 32-bit.
  • ARM - 64-bit (Aarch64) with limitations.

Why CPUs older than i686 aren't supported?

  • i686 (essentially Pentium II) introduced a wide range of features that are critical for the Redox kernel.
  • It would be possible to go all the way back to i486, but that would make us lose nice functions like fxsave/fxrstor and we would need to build userspace without any SSE code.
  • i386 has no atomics (at all) which makes it not likely as a target.

Hardware Interfaces

  • ACPI
  • PCI

(USB soon)

Video

  • VGA - (BIOS)
  • GOP (UEFI)
  • LLVMpipe (OpenGL CPU emulation)

(Intel/AMD and others in the future)

Sound

  • Intel chipsets
  • Realtek chipsets
  • PC speaker

(Sound Blaster soon)

Storage

  • IDE (PATA)
  • SATA (AHCI)
  • NVMe

(USB soon)

Input

  • PS/2 keyboards, mouse and touchpad
  • USB keyboards, mouse and touchpad

Internet

  • Intel Gigabit ethernet
  • Intel 10 Gigabit ethernet
  • Realtek ethernet

(Wi-Fi and Atheros ethernet soon)

I have a low-end computer, would Redox work on it?

A CPU is the most complex machine of the world: even the oldest processors are powerful for some tasks but not for others.

The main problem with old computers is the amount of RAM available (they were sold in a era where RAM chips were expensive) and the lack of SSE/AVX extensions (programs use them to speed up the algorithms). Because of this some modern programs may not work or require a lot of RAM to perform complex tasks.

Redox itself will work normally if the processor architecture is supported by the system, but the performance and stability may vary per program.