After one and a half years of development, the release of the ReactOS 0.4.14 operating system has been presented, aimed at ensuring compatibility with Microsoft Windows programs and drivers. The operating system is in the alpha stage of development. An installation ISO image (115 MB) and a Live build (in a zip archive of 85 MB) are prepared for download. The project's code is distributed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses.
Key changes:
- The user shell has been enhanced with the 'Send To' feature, allowing users to send files and folders to predefined locations such as 'My Documents', the desktop, or a compressed file directory. The context menu on the desktop has been updated with 'Open File Location' and 'Open Command prompt here' commands to open the directory of the selected file in the file manager and display the command prompt dialog. Scrolling issues have been resolved, certain COM (Component Object Model) interfaces have been improved, and regressions in the drag & drop mechanism have been fixed.
- Support for booting on NEC PC-9800 computers has been added, which are equipped with processors more powerful than i586 and include over 64MB of RAM. Support for operation in the Neko Project 21/W emulator has also been implemented.
- In the network stack, improved support for the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) has been implemented, which previously did not cover the entire specification. The new version adds support for IOCTL_ICMP_ECHO_REQUEST calls, and all Icmp* procedures have been completely rewritten. As a result, network drivers can now correctly transmit ICMP request and response packets to applications, and the tracert utility displays all the necessary information.
- The safe removal dialog for devices has been improved to show connected devices.
- Work has continued on fixing bugs and enhancing the stability of the operating system kernel. Improvements have been made, and some parts of the memory manager have been rewritten, with work starting on implementing support for PAE (Physical Address Extension). Code for exception handling from the Wine codebase has been transferred to the CRT (C Run-Time). In the PnP driver (classpnp.sys), issues that hindered normal operation with storage devices have been fixed. Interaction with devices in the input/output subsystem has been improved. A series of vulnerabilities caused by buffer overflows have been eliminated.
- An initial implementation of the Resource Arbiter library has been added, which can be used to resolve access conflicts to resources in drivers for buses such as PCI. Code for debugging PnP and input/output managers has also been added. The PnP manager now supports matching device capabilities with flags reflecting those capabilities.
- The kernel debugger and related modules have been updated. In the interactive KDBG debugger, the handling of the cregs and tss commands has been improved, and the TSS processing code has been rewritten. The implementation of debug filters has been completed.
- The NetKVM VirtIO driver has been included, which accelerates network operations in environments running on QEMU-based virtualization systems. KVM.
- The FreeLoader bootloader has been improved, now allowing for the booting of 64-bit systems based on the Linux kernel, and issues with reading from the Ext2 filesystem have been resolved. Crashes during boot in debugging mode have been eliminated. ARC emulation has been added, necessary for supporting NEC PC-98 hardware. Booting support on Xbox devices has been enhanced.
- The implementations of the on-screen keyboard and tools for people with disabilities have been updated.
- Work on the ISA PnP driver, which provides device detection on the ISA bus, has continued.
- Bug fixes have been made in the comctl32 (Common Controls) module that were interfering with the normal display of the Visual Basic 6 installer.
- Outdated fonts have been removed, leading to a slight performance increase, reduced RAM consumption, and a decrease in the size of system images.
- Synchronization with the Wine Staging codebase version 4.18 has been carried out, and the versions of third-party components have been updated: mpg123 1.25.13, libjpeg 9d, mbedtls 2.7.14, libtiff 4.1.0, ACPICA 20200326, BtrFS 1.7.2, glu32 9.0.1. The list of root certificates has been updated.
Source: opennet.ru
