ReactOS 0.4.7 Released (reactos.org) 94
jeditobe writes: OSNews reports that the latest version of ReactOS has been released:
"ReactOS 0.4.7 has been released, and it contains a ton of fixes, improvements, and new features. Judging by the screenshots, ReactOS 0.4.7 can run Opera, Firefox, and Mozilla all at once, which is good news for those among us who want to use ReactOS on a more daily basis. There's also a new application manager which, as the name implies, makes it easier to install and uninstall applications, similar to how package managers on Linux work. On a lower level, ReactOS can now deal with Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS, and NFS partitions." General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.7 is also available. ISO images are ready at the ReactOS Download page.
Re: First post!!! (Score:1)
The correct question is: does it run Crysis?
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Mighty impressive that it works at all, even if they're at the seconds-per-frame level of performance. Congratulations ReactOS, that's an awesome milestone.
Wonder if it's running in Direct3D 9 or Direct3D 11. Crysis supports both.
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Good point.
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At least Wine does." [winehq.org]
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Very cool. The game's Vulkan calls just map across to ordinary Vulkan calls in Linux, unlike Direct3D which Wine has to reimplement.
Re: First post!!! (Score:4, Informative)
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I fail to see where the real failure is here.
The real failure is that it will literally never be useful. Also, WINE has literally never put out a release that wasn't absolutely chock-full of regressions. If they're going to pull new code from Wine periodically, they're going to be pulling regressions with it. They have taken on a literally impossible task. You can't ever reach full compatibility with Windows because even Microsoft can't do that. Microsoft software is full of code that Microsoft doesn't understand. That's why their specs for the DOC fo
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It doesn't need to have constant, up to the minute compatibility. If it reaches 90% compatibility with Windows XP, Vista/7, then it will run almost everything that anyone cares about.
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If it reaches 90% compatibility with Windows XP, Vista/7, then it will run almost everything that anyone cares about.
Not only will that never happen, but it will never happen in ways that make almost everything occasionally explode in your face. Windows wasn't designed, it evolved, it grew from a tiny tumor to a gigantic malignant prominence. Trying to emulate that is a fool's errand. Everyone who cares has been showered in Windows licenses since time was time, and can run Windows in a VM for Windows compatibility.
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You don't and can't know that. Just look at how amazing Wine is these days. ReactOS can't be any worse than Windows. At least they have competent developers, which is more than I can say for Microsoft.
Looking at Windows 1.0 and Windows 10 side by side, they look and operate very similarly. The only true evolution along the way was at Windows 95 when they introduced the start menu. Since Windows 95, Windows really hasn't changed all that much. Some superficial stuff and lots of bug fixes, but to the user the
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Looking at Windows 1.0 and Windows 10 side by side, they look and operate very similarly.
Microsoft was on the Motif WG and involved in the creation of OS/2, which despite its wacky mouse bindings operates essentially the same way as everything else but classic MacOS as well. If they leave one positive legacy behind, it will be the unification of the majority-expected window layout. It's downright shocking (or at least surprising) when they (or anyone else making a desktop) deviates from it.
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Windows has supported IFS (installable filesystems) since at least NT. That no one has written drivers for other filesystems is not a limitation of Windows.
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Ande if you think it's truly a fa8ilure, go put your coding hat on and do a better job!
"Judging by the screenshots" (Score:1)
"Judging by the screenshots ..."
way to go!
"can run Opera, Firefox, and Mozilla all at once, which is good news for those among us who want to use ReactOS on a more daily basis"
judging by those words, running several(and same?) browsers at once, for a long time, is one of "our" primary daily activities.
get back to be when it can do CEPH with hyper-v (Score:2)
and no I do not want a i-scsi gateway.
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run as in an driver to be able to network mount and use the pool + tie to hyper-v vm's as there disk.
Getting better (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not OS/2 ?? (Score:4, Funny)
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Because it was sold to some other company and called eComStation.
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false, it's still very much alive and well and powering point of sales systems at places near you maybe including your post office.
In other words, here's your OS/2
http://www.ecomstation.com/ [ecomstation.com]
VMS + 1 = WNT (Score:2)
There was also a FreeVMS project a while back but they decided to restart it from scratch and pretty soon it wasn't intended as a reimplementation of VMS, but rather a new OS vaguely based off of it.
I believe that project was called ReactOS.
(ReactOS is a clone of Windows NT, whose design is heavily inspired by that of Digital's VMS [itprotoday.com].)
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Will you fucking drop that VMS crap? Some of the ideas are vaguely reminiscent of VMS, but they are worlds apart in everything that matters.
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The idea of IRQLs came from VMS.
http://www.osronline.com/showT... [osronline.com]
OK, gather the responses from this forum and show to him.
IRQL is derived on the hardware interrupt level (the interrupt controller
register). Historically this is the PDP/VAX-11 feature, and thus a VMS feature,
though things are going back - in modern x64 CPUs, you have CR8 register as APIC
TPR, so, once again the IRQL register is embedded to the CPU.
But it is too convinient to also implement "preemptivity suspend" as an IRQL
raise. After all, ISRs run with preemptivity suspended.
Though perhaps the name IRQL was invented for NT
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]
The people who built DEC's VMS operating system also helped design the processors that DEC used, and many of them came to Microsoft and designed Windows NT, which was the basis for modern versions of Windows, including Windows XP and Windows 7. These guys wanted a way to disable (very quickly) just some of the interrupts in the system. They considered it useful to hold off interrupts from some sources while servicing interrupts from other sources.
They also realized that, just as you must acquire locks in the same order everywhere in your code to avoid deadlocks, you must also service interrupts with the same relative priority every time. It doesn't work if the clock interrupts are sometimes more important than the IDE controller's interrupts and sometimes they aren't.
Interrupts are frequently called "Interrupt ReQuests" and the priority of a specific IRQ is its Level. These letters, all run together, are IRQL.
So if you lay out all the interrupt sources in the system and create a priority for each one, or sometimes a priority for each group, you can start to do interesting things.
Consider a spinlock. Spinlocks (at least in the traditional sense) are implemented by having a processor spin in a tight loop trying to atomically modify a variable. The cache coherency hardware guarantees that only one processor can do that at a time, so lock acquisition goes only to the processor that succeeds. Other processors keep spinning until they succeed.
The processor that "owns" the lock needs to release the lock as soon as possible, as the other (waiting) processors are burning up processor time waiting to acquire the lock. So you really don't want to interrupt that processor and schedule some other thread for execution, causing all the waiters to spin until the owning thread is rescheduled.
In this situation, some operating systems encourage the owner of the spinlock to disable all interrupts so that the code can't be interrupted. (Note, too, that interrupts really need to be disabled before trying to acquire the lock, or the thread might be interrupted between acquiring the lock and disabling interrupts.)
The designers of VMS and NT decided that they didn't want to disable all interrupts just because some code somewhere acquired a spinlock. Some things shouldn't wait. TLB flushes, are a good example. So if only some interrupts are disabled while a spinlock is held, then you can still briefly interrupt the code that owns the lock for much more important tasks. Perhaps even more importantly, you can interrupt the processors which are spinning, waiting to acquire a spinlock for these important tasks, causing them to do something useful instead of just spinning.
Note that this means that every spinlock has an associated IRQL, and you have to use that IRQL consistently, or the machine will deadlock. In NT, by default, every spinlock has the same IRQL, called DISPATCH_LEVEL. DISPATCH_LEVEL means, essentially, that the interrupts which can cause a thread to stop running are disabled. (More about that later.)
Interestingly you had to simulate IRQL by masking interrupts in the PIC in the original PC. The NT HAL for x86 apparently had an optimisation where it would mask them in software and only update the PIC if one came along, because the PIC was effectively on the ISA bus.
Of course times changed. Now x86/x64 chips have an Local APIC which you can write to quickly an
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XP used to bluescreen on me every once and a while until SP2 & 3. Then it became rarer, but still happened.
I can still bluescreen my Windows 7 laptop by using th
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(ReactOS is a clone of Windows NT, whose design is heavily inspired by that of Digital's VMS.)
Windows NT borrowed just as much from Apollo DomainOS as it did from VMS. Some of the basic architecture is similar to VMS, but only the very basic stuff. Windows NT is "heavily inspired" by VMS in the same way that DOS was heavily inspired by CPM. They look superficially similar, and that's it.
CP/M + 1 = 86-DOS (Score:2)
Windows NT is "heavily inspired" by VMS in the same way that DOS was heavily inspired by CPM.
According to Wikipedia's article about early DOS [wikipedia.org], this would mean that Windows NT "had a command structure and application programming interface that imitated that of Digital [Equipment Corp.'s VMS] operating system, which made it easy to port programs from the latter." What other excuse would there be to keep (say) 32 priority levels, each with two half-levels?
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How about FreeXWorks, i.e. a vxWorks clone.
vxWorks is objectively the best OS that has ever existed. Or ever will exist.
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Back around 2001 - 2005 I worked on an ECM that ran vxWorks / Windriver. The amount of work it could do was awesome.
It's painfully obvious when your RTOS is not doing the right thing when it's scheduling spark and fuel to a running engine.
Your simply can't wait for software sometimes.
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I remember having a vxWorks system on my desk that run an FTP server which could pull files off a NOR flash array. It easily outperformed the Windows PC on my desk for TCIP/IP and filesystem access, despite running a much slower CPU and having what by modern standards was really slow flash memory (of course of the time it wasn't too bad - only slightly slower on a read than uncached main memory)
And when you traced through the code you could see why. It used zbuf TCP, all the code was Ring 0, and the most co
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objectively the best
I'm willing to bet it doesn't compete with Windows for high-performance real-time graphics on modern GPUs. Context is everything, there is no 'objective'.
I don't know much about the real-time OS world though. What's the best the FOSS world has to offer on that front?
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objectively the best
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Do you have something to contribute to the discussion, or not?
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Wat? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm intrigued by this executable named simply "Mozilla", and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Now we know how Mozilla continues to collect that $375 Mil/year from Yahoo. They've got a ReactOS box doing the real work. Actually, that answers a lot of questions about them...
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You must be new here. They obviously mean "Seamonkey" (for those who remember "Netscape Communicator").
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You must be new here. They obviously mean "Seamonkey" (for those who remember "Netscape Communicator").
I think that's the joke. ;-) (Party like it's 2002.)
Don't want to be arrogant, but... (Score:2)
I donated to this project (Score:1)
Its worth it. I hope that enough people will be dis-satisfied with the shitty UI and data harvesting of windows 10 and go to this. I wonder if it can succesfully join a windows domain?
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Not a chance.
It's 20+ years behind in some areas and nowhere near being any kind of replacement for anything.
The domain stuff... literally years away for any level of completeness or reliability despite being "worked on" since 2009 and before then. Hell, you can only just about trust Samba to run as a secondary. I wouldn't want to be in charge of a Samba-only AD tree (which still needs Windows tools to manage it!). And then you may as well just use Samba and the various OS clients that let you integrate
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Which is exactly why he donated. If people invest their time, skills and money into it then there's now reason it cannot 'develop'. Prior to Windows 10 it was a great idea to have a 'free' version of windows that you can install on as many machines as you like without paying, but now that Windows 10 is 'free' it's not as necessary. Still, having an open source version of Windows is only a good thing, especially if it's bright up to scratch.
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Oh, and i use the ReactOS regedit on a day-to-day basis when user rights have restricted access to the one baked into Windows. Also the paint clone is pretty good.
Re:I donated to this project (Score:4, Insightful)
The domain stuff...
End users don't need or care about that. Most Windows users aren't joined to a domain.
Even Wine is pretty much dead in practical terms
It is? Funny, because the Wine that I use gets updated often and is so good that I have a hard time finding stuff that won't work on it. Hell, in many instances Wine is MORE compatible with more Windows software than Windows itself.
FreeDOS was a success, but it took 25 years to get the equivalent of DOS up and running
No it didn't. FreeDOS was at parity with MS-DOS ages ago and has long since surpassed it.
they can never do anything but play catch-up
ReactOS doesn't need to play catch up. It just has to be good enough. For most people, that's Windows XP compatibility.
I think perhaps you should stop worrying about what other people are doing. You seem awfully controlling and insecure. Maybe you should try doing something productive instead of sitting around whining like a petulant child.
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Yes, well, MS didn't plagiarise BSD sockets or anything ...
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Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations ReactOS Team!