The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.6 as a
continuation of its three month cadence.
0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot
issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way
avoiding corruption of the partition list structures. ReactOS Loader can
now load custom kernels and HALs.
Printing Subsystem is still greenish in 0.4.6, however Colin Finck has
implemented a huge number of new APIs and fixed some of the bugs
reported and detected by the ReactOS automated tests.
Regarding drivers, Pierre Schweitzer has added an NFS driver and started
implementing RDBSS and RXCE, needed to enable SMB support in the future,
Sylvain Petreolle has imported a Digital TV tuning device driver and the
UDFS driver has been re-enabled in 0.4.6 after fixing several deadlocks
and issues which was making it previously unusable. Critical bugs and
leakages in CDFS, SCSI and HDAUDBUS have been also fixed.
From the Compatibility point of view, 0.4.6 introduces, thanks to Mark
Jansen, a shim engine as part of the new application compatibility
framework. This shim engine is disabled by default in 0.4.6 but can be
enabled through the ReactOS registry. This release also includes a
special NTDLL library that exports some of the NTDLL Vista+ functions
needed by newer software pieces.
0.4.5 introduced msstyle themes in ReactOS, allowing you to switch to
something different, more modern or nostalgic if you don't like the
Classical skin. In 0.4.6, and thanks again to your donations, Giannis
has fixed lots of bugs in Shell32, Comctrl32 and Browseui, so now
msstyle themes are fully working. In 0.4.6 efforts were made to improve
the user experience. "Lock Taskbar", "Hide inactive icons", and "Group
similar taskbar buttons" settings are properly remembered now each time
you reboot ReactOS. Explorer’s taskbar is finally resizable. Tiled,
centered and stretched wallpapers are correctly placed now. Explorer’s
addressbar is much improved, and now works nicely with symlinks. The
clipboard has gone through a massive fixup, making it more usable and
reliable.
0.4.6 is much more stable now as a result of several memory manager,
ntoskrnl and filesystem fixes. To name a few, mapping a view of the
physical memory sections works now, several MM and NTOS leakages were
plumbed, and NTOS:IO critical bugs were fixed. Several buffer overflows
and overruns, logic issues and dead code detected by Coverity and other
tools have been fixed, leading to less corruptions and leaks.
In order to track ReactOS compatibility with Windows behavior, 1,088,893
unit test cases have been added since 0.4.5. This new release has been
tested through 14,238,159 unit test cases, failing just 18,419 (a 0,129%
ratio failure). Still, ReactOS is marked as Alpha for the moment.
Eric Kohl has implemented NETAPI, the network transport and security
library. Peter Hater has reworked WinSock2. Several bugs affecting
rendering performance, NtGDI, brushes, and shape creation are now fixed
thanks to James Tabor, Mark Jansen, and Thomas Faber. Amine Khaldi has
synced Wine, and tons of other third party modules needed for 0.4.6.
Font substitution and font breaking issues have been fixed by Katayama
Hirofumi MZ and Giannis. ReactOS now supports the Esperanto language
thanks to Mike Swanson and lot of contributors have contributed with
translations and patches.
- Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-046-released
- General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.6
- Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.6
- Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.6
- Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.6
- Download page: https://reactos.org/download
