Important News and Updates - Ros-general

8 Jan 2007

Dear ReactOS Users, Testers and Developers,

I've chosen to write up a small letter with some recent news on ReactOS'
development. I'm hoping that putting my name behind it will increase the
number of people interested and informed.

-
First of all, a small update on the kernel. I'm currently working on Ob,
 the Object Manager. I have a large patch that I've split up into 4. The
first patch addresses several bugs and adds more security paths and
checks that will be required for later functionality. The second patch
adds some lacking functionality to the Object Manager which might have
caused bugs in the I/O Manager. The third patch adds locking and
scalability improvements to the Object Manager, and fixes multiple race
conditions which could've led to random crashes. The last patch should
cleanup and remaining bugs/fixmes apart from non-implemented but
not-critical functionality.

After this is done, I plan on working in the Kernel itself to make sure
that ReactOS boots on VMWare 6.0 and VMWare Server 1.1 (my current
Vmware testing platforms). I generally use KQEMU, so VMWare bugs are
usually hidden from me. I also have a nice piece of code from one of our
older developers (blight/Gregor Anich) which should allow me to fix
Mesa, aka OpenGL.

After these low-level regressions have been fixed, I will then commit my
new LPC code, and start working on cleaning up some old Ex code. These
changes will basically make ReactOS more compatible and reliable, by
auditing for broken code.

-
Secondly, on the topic of regression testing. I'm hoping most of you are
now using the official RosBE, the ReactOS Building Environment. If
you're not, please do so (on Windows). It is the *only* supported
environment. If you're having problems with headers, compiling, or are
seeing boot failures, please do not come to ask us for help until you
are using the RosBE. This will help us avoid many compiler
incompatibilities and make us bettter able to help you in a timely fashion.

Because such problems can also arise from badly configured emulators, I
will create the RosTE, or ReactOS Testing Environment. This will be a
packaged version of KQEMU along with several helpful utilities and
scripts, which will allow you to mount and unmount your qemu image, use
make_install properly, use make install_registry properly, test ReactOS
and the LiveCD/BootCD in the latest patched QEMU with the KQEMU
Accelerator module in full-kernel mode (an improvement of 4x+ over
standard QEMU), as well as the Serial Port Redirection Gateway which
will allow you to get qemu's output in a telnet box with unlimited easy
scrolling, as well as the ability to copy/paste text from it, which is
normally impossible with QEMU. This version will also support using
WinDBG to debug ReactOS, when our kernel implements Kd.

In the end, the RosBE and RosTE should make it a lot easier to identify
the source of some common problems experienced by testers. I cannot
offer a similar TE for VMWare unfortunately, since that's a commercial
product, and VMWare still offers an interesting testing framework
because it behaves differently from QEmu in many ways. However, if you
have an issue in VMWare, I strongly suggest you then try out to
reproduce it in RosTE, once it will be available. That way, we'll be
able to isolate the bug to an emulator.

-
I have been invited as a speaker to multiple conferences this year,
where I will have a chance to talk about, and present ReactOS, in hopes
of making stronger ties with the FOSS community, raise awareness for the
project, and get more developers/support. One of them is the SOCAL 2007
Expo in Los Angeles in Feburary this year, and another one is the
Intertional Free Software Forum in April, in Brazil. There also remains
the possibility of other such expos.

Because these conferences are not commercial, even speakers do not
usually have their air fare or hotel costs covered. As I am a student,
travel fare to these places makes a large dent in my savings, since a
single conference alone can cost me 1500$ or more including air travel,
hotel, food, transporation, etc. As a result, your donations would be
greatly appreciated.

The ReactOS Foundation should start an official fundraiser tomorrow or
later this week as soon as the new webpage is properly working. I urge
you to donate and help me out so that I can have the chance to promote
ReactOS. Additionally, the money you donate will also help ReactOS with
bandwidth costs, server upgrades, etc, so it's not a personal Alex fund.

-
Finally, Aleksey made some suggestions on my behalf recently, as well as
posted some requests. I will re-address the latter here, because these
are really important to me:

1) Someone please look at rbuild's dependency code and make it output a
dependency tree, that can be read by a human. This should let me see
things such as "oh ok, ntdll needs libfoo, and libfoo needs libbar". Or
"oh, this 10KB application requires a 100MB library, can we do something
better here?".

2) Someone please look at rbuild's XML parsing and "Component/module"
creation so that it is possible to build an entire directory as a
component. For example, "make drivers" should work, as well as "make
base".
-

That's all, thank you for your time.

-- 
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
Project Lead, TinyKRNL
Kernel-Mode Software Design Engineer, ReactOS