Status updates of ReactOS people

[Colin Finck]

Hi everybody,

As promised, here are the status updates of several ReactOS people based 
on the texts I received after our failed meeting a week ago.


Thomas Faber has reported that the Kernel-Mode Test Framework is pretty 
much standing, together with extensive tests for Spin Locks, Executive 
Resources and IRQ-Level functions. Additional "comfort" functions might 
be added as the need arises.
Basic tests also exist for Singly and Doubly Linked Lists, Hard Error 
Messages, Deferred Procedure Calls and Asynchronous Procedure Call 
Disabling. Furthermore, applicable tests have been ported from the old 
"kmtests" module.
Thomas is currently working on tests for Events, Fast and Guarded 
Mutexes as well as basic I/O functionality (Driver/Device Objects, 
app-driver communication). Latter ones are partly based on the 
"not-applicable" old tests. More tests concerning Object Referencing, 
Singly and Doubly Linked Lists and Sequenced lists are going to follow. 
Even more may follow afterwards based on his personal function list or 
current requirements. Finally, the integration with our automated 
testing tools has to be tested.

Colin Finck did not have much time for ReactOS in the last month, so he 
could just assist Pierre Schweitzer with setting up the Icinga 
monitoring solution.

Claudiu Mihail has integrated lwIP into the tcpip.sys driver. The 
library has also been updated to the most recent version (1.40), which 
required no changes to the interface code. On top of this, the speed 
issue has been resolved, so the performance of our lwIP-based stack is 
on par with our existing OSKitTCP-based stack now.
The new network stack has been tested by replacing the tcpip.sys of a 
regular Trunk build with the lwIP-based one. This posed no problems, so 
merging the new stack back to Trunk should work nicely. According to 
Claudiu, initial testing using applications such as Opera, Firefox and 
BitTorrent shows very promising results in terms of stability and 
performance.
In the short term future, he plans to conduct more testing to fix any 
outstanding bugs in the implementation. Besides, he plans to optimize 
some aspects of the implementation, especially regarding memory usage, 
together with Art Yerkes and Cameron Gutman.
For the long-term future, which also includes the time after GSoC, he 
thinks about moving more TCP/IP functionality to lwIP such as UDP.

Pierre Schweitzer has been setting up an Icinga solution for monitoring 
all our physical servers and VMs, including the services running on 
them. This will allow the project to have a higher quality of service, 
and let ReactOS sysadmins be aware quicker about issues raising on the 
servers.
He also announced that he is leaving ReactOS development and only 
focuses on sysadmin work for the project.


- Colin