A few more comments to what Ge van Geldorp wrote.
Like in many other open source projects, documentation
is not our strongest
point...
Nature has no sort of own documentation I am aware of... but it is an
excellent project! Many books were written later about it. ROS is just a
few picoseconds after the Big Bang... ;)
On the positive side, when you find some docs on how
Windows does
something (lots of those floating around) then often it will apply to
ReactOS too.
Apples are apples! iPods are iPods...
[omissis]
The kernel will initialize itself and the drivers which
were loaded by
FreeLdr. This should give it access to the disk. It will then proceed to
load other drivers. At the end of the boot process it will start the first
usermode app, the Session Manager Sub System (SMSS.EXE).
At this point, do not confuse that kind of session with a typical
Unix/Windows user session. SM sessions are "emulated operating systems".
At present, ReactOS boots only the emulated Win32(tm) session
(CSRSS.EXE). We hope it will be able to boot more in the future.
SMSS will load and start the environment subsystems
(e.g. CSRSS.EXE, the
usermode Win32 subsystem and WIN32K.SYS, it's kernelmode counterpart). It
will also start WINLOGON.EXE, the logon process. WinLogon would normally be
responsible for logging in users, but since we don't support security yet
that's basically stubbed out. WinLogon will then start the users shell.
Recently, in an attempt to clean the design a little to make the SM
support easily other OS emulators, loading of WIN32K.SYS and running
WINLOGON.EXE were moved in CSRSS.EXE.
--
:Emanuele Aliberti