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
Drew Scott Daniels schrieb:
Hi,
first of all, I'm no developer of ReactOS, but I follow this project since one and a half year, so I think most of my answers are correct. If a dev finds a mistake, please correct it, but my answer is intended to give you more time to develop ReactOS instead of answering mails ;-)
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).
As Alex is currently doing a major kernel rewrite, I think something like this should wait, until he's finished that. IIRC his changes will make the ReactOS kernel far more compatible to existing drivers than the current kernel is and will make ReactOS more stable on real hardware.
I'd love to use ReactOS to replace simple Windows XP Embedded images (with many drivers and features stripped out).
After the kernel changes, ReactOS could be ready for that, maybe the TCP/IP stack could use some love, but in a non-networking environment and without a GUI or just a simple shell instead of explorer, ReactOS could definitely be ready for embedded use by then, and that's also where I see ReactOS first used in production environments.
Greets,
David Hinz
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David Hinz -
Drew Scott Daniels