[ros-dev] Thanks. ReactOS helped me develop and debug Windows drivers.

[Drew Scott Daniels]

Hi,
I wanted to extend my thanks to ReactOS developers. I have used the
ReactOS source code on several occasions to help develop and debug
drivers intended for Microsoft Windows (WDM NT). I also used it to help
diagnose a hardware problem.

The Vista Windows Driver Kit sometimes include sample driver code
that will not work on systems newer than Windows 2003. I think I
actually used OpenRCE.org to help figure this out, but ReactOS does a
better job of letting me follow kernel level function logic.

The new PREfast annotations are also poorly documented but I don't
expect ReactOS will help with that. Perhaps its drivers could help
though.

One computer we had was bug checking (BSoD) with an NMI error with
Windows XP. Microsoft's documentation on this was poor and sometimes
misleading. Many other web sites provided incomplete (mostly just
inquiries), or misleading information (speculation that the wrong
hardware was at fault). With WinDBG, a search engine, and the ReactOS
source code, I managed to find what hardware was generating the bug
check. I then looked up the specifications from Intel and got quite a
bit of a better understanding.

I vaguely recall Walter Oney's WDM driver book provides a stub driver
which will help newer Windows drivers run on older versions of Windows
(although it's not redistributable and is documented as a workaround he
doesn't want others to use). Pointers to this may help ReactOS driver
developers.

Making sure source code is easy to search with Google is very useful. I
see that Google's source code search seems to search ReactOS, and
there's some Doxygen documentation that can be searched. Unfortunately
SVN or even other current source code seemingly cannot be searched without
using alternate methods (such as downloading and searching offline).
Ideally, something like lxr would be available for ReactOS, and through
Google. I also have the same wish for the most recent version of the
Linux kernel (Google doesn't seem to index lxr).

Having more sample driver code (even third party) would certainly be
useful.

I'd like to sell companies on using ReactOS, but there seems to be a
real anti production use message widely conveyed. I feel ReactOS is far
more stable than is given credit. That said, it would be nice if even
just some basic core part of ReactOS was stabilised (not even at a
Desktop user level). By "stabilised", I mean if people could test and
testify certain kinds of qualified stability (e.g. Version q ran x days,
but it was only doing y and had z hardware). Also it would be nice to
have even more information about changes to ReactOS that have/might make
things likely to break (bugcheck, freeze, not behave...). At least one
of the recent newsletters helped with that.

I'd love to use ReactOS to replace simple Windows XP Embedded images 
(with many drivers and features stripped out).

Once again, thanks for all the ReactOS efforts. I'm sure I do not yet
fully appreciate the resources available to me because of ReactOS, but
the ones I've found have been extremely useful.

     Drew Daniels
Resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html