ReactOS Revealed

reactosfanboy writes "DRM Hacker Alex Ionescu explained the internals of ReactOS in a recent talk. Ionescu indicates that ReactOS is nearly 100% binary and API compatible with the Windows 2003 kernel, and that they are aiming for full Vista compatibility. Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time." In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally." Here are slides from Ionescu's talk (PDF), which might prove more useful than the video offered in various forms at over 450 MB.

On the contrary...

...but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs ... the Windows emulation seems perfect !

Re:On the contrary...

We're kind of ruining the top post which was actually pretty funny, but...

I would almost agree with you, if only looking at a snapshot from about 2002 until 2006 during which I was no longer dealing with 9x and NT4 installations. Installation headaches were pretty commonplace prior to these years. Once hardware vendors had all gotten used to the ways of NT5, installing Win2K and XP became a total breeze. Rarely have I had trouble installing either operating system. They will choke occasionally on cheap and/or new hardware, but with typical stuff installation is usually a no-brainer.

And now Vista is upon us, and it's not detecting a lot of real obscure hardware, like say, MY CDROM DRIVE. WTF. Once again it's become hit and miss...or would be, if I chose to install Vista in production at this time.

Difficulty installing an OS isn't really a good measure of quality anyhow. I recently had a bad experience installing Ubuntu 6.05LTS to an array on an adaptec I2O controller. Rock solid once I got it fixed. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

BSOD-OS

Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time.

Yeah, thank goodness the OS it's modeled after *never* does that.

Re:BSOD-OS

On a serious note.
Given the limited resources of the ReactOS team it's not even that bad. Even Microsoft had (serious) issues with pretty much every new Windows version presentation.

Because ReactOS does it differently

MS slowdown is caused by thousands of poor lines of code which require countless programmers. ReactOS achieves the same slowdown by just using a few lines of code in slow_down.c:

/* Waste time to look like real Windows */

int i;

for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}

Link?

How about a link to ReactOS [reactos.org] in the summary?

Re:Link?

How about a link to ReactOS in the summary?

This time, we don't want to take their website down.

Doubt microsoft would care

ReactOS would still be unsupported and untrusted in business, and it's proliferation would only add to MSFT's dominance of the market.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

ReactOS would still be unsupported and untrusted in business, and it's proliferation would only add to MSFT's dominance of the market.

ReactOS would be useful for companies looking for a way to move off of Windows but who have binaries that only run on Windows. Due to the proliferation of VM technology, a VM running ReactOS on top of your OS of choice could make migration away from Windows cheap enough to be an option. If ReactOS is cheap enough, it could displace Windows by itself for limited applications. A free OS Dell or someone can install that still lets them get paid for crapware and which still lets end users run games and junk software from Walmart could easily grab market share away from Windows. Anything that threatens MS's dominance with Windows, whether it detracts from Linux or your favorite OS or not, is good for motivating MS to make Windows better. If Windows is as good as other OS's, I don't care if it is dominant as much.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

Wine offers a much more compelling method of migrating from Windows. ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you. Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

Wine offers a much more compelling method of migrating from Windows.

WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one. I don't have any real confidence that WINE will ever work reliably for arbitrary software. It is a nice crutch for specific, common applications. It is a reasonable route to building a quick and dirty port. I don't think it will ever fill the role of a method of moving away from Windows and still running random (often proprietary or outdated) applications.

ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you.

That is pretty much what I am doing now, except most WinXP licenses are not portable to new hardware and such a move is often accompanied by a move to new hardware. ReactOS is likely to be more lightweight than the current version of Windows and less likely to cause headaches with licensing and registration and DRM shutting it down arbitrarily. It also would have save my company a hundred bucks a license and that adds up.

Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.

I actually looked at WINE and a couple of commercial WINE-based offerings and ReactOS before I chose to run WinXP in a VM. It was the most expensive solution by far (other than Windows outside a VM) but the only one that worked. In future I could see going either way, but I think the overhead from ReactOS is likely going to end up less of a consideration that the necessarily limited range of WINE.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one.

From the linked PDF:

Wine makes up the bulk of ReactOS'sWin32 Libraries, which are mostly left untouched.

100% Compatible?

Not until all the malware works too!

With no disrespect to the ReactOS developers...

They might want to look up what "identical" means. There is still a very long way [oregontel.com] to go [reactos.org]. (I could have put a traditional screenshot up there too, from W2K or even W95, and it would still be true.)

You asked for compatibility...

onescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is ready for prime time."

Fixed.

Wow!

This has inspired me to create a ground-up 100% reimplementation of the AOL client, identical in looks and functionality. Wish me luck!

Re:Wow!

The official aol client is like being poked in the eye by a sharp planet.

BARF

I just had to wonder, WHY would anyone develop another OS that is "identical" to Windows?

Windows is bad enough...why do it all over again?

Re:BARF

I just had to wonder, WHY would anyone develop another OS that is "identical" to Windows?
Windows is bad enough...why do it all over again?

So you won't have to actually run Windows in order to run Windows programs such as Photoshop, AutoCAD, and most video games. WINE isn't good enough for everyone.

WINE

Wine
Is
Not
Enough

brilliant!

Non-Vista-compatible version?

Having begun the struggle with adapting application installers to Vista, I think I'd be more interested in a version of ReactOS that ISN'T Vista compatible.

You can imagine what the folks in Redmond are ....

Thinking about this:

"In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally.""

People at the Microsoft campus must be moving the furniture out of Ballmer's office as we speak.

ironic

If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either [reactos.org].

Re:ironic

If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either.

Honestly, can anyone tell me what advantages that ReactOS has over something like Linux+Wine? I've heard several reasons before, but they don't seem to stand up to an honest analysis, such as:

Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.

Speed - Wine, since it is an emulator, can never be as fast as ReactOS, a dedicated OS. This is usually advanced without any sort of benchmarks or other proof to back it up. First, Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is just an implementation of the win32 api. There is no technical reason why Wine couldn't be as fast as other "native" Linux APIs, such as QT or Gtk+. Furthermore, there have long been reports of Windows programs running faster on Wine than native Windows.

Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper [sourceforge.net] have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested. Of course, Linux already has drivers available for a great deal of hardware. There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.

User Interface Familiarity - Windows users would feel right at home, with virtually no learning curve. This ignores the fact that anyone who has been through Win 3.1 -> Win 9x -> Win XP -> Vista will know that Window's interface is anything but consistent, things move around and change quite a bit between major releases. Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.

Don't get me wrong, I think ReactOS is a pretty cool project, and it would be kind of neat to have an open source Windows clone, however as I said I can't really find much practical reason for it beyond the coolness factor. It seems like one would be better off just integrating Wine into Linux better. Please feel free to enlighten me. ;)

Re:ironic

Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.

Not true. ReactOS uses some of Wine's codebase, but many key areas (window management, memory management, thread support, etc.) are rewritten from scratch to be more compatible with Windows own implementations of these. I've seen Wine fail to run applications before because of some subtle difference in how Linux handles these tasks to Windows. ReactOS can eliminate these issues.

Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested.

Yes. Unfortunately NdisWrapper doesn't really work very well (my limited experiments suggest only about half of the cards out there work with it), CaptiveFS is slow, and no other projects have produced useful results in this field. This is because running a Windows device driver without a Windows kernel is quite tricky. NDIS drivers are a simpler problem: NDIS was originally developed to be an open, cross-platform specification by 3Com. MS have embraced & extended it since then, but at its heart it is still much more portable than many other driver types used by Windows.

There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.

Frankly, there are a lot of us who have become fed up waiting for working open source drivers for our hardware and would rather just plug a black box in and be done with it.

Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.

Actually, there are very substantial differences that can be deeply annoying because they're about the way the basic system works. Details like which control panel applet you use to start or stop services (e.g.) aren't as annoying (to me) as the lack of feedback when a program is starting (KDE does have some feedback, but it doesn't show if the program wasn't started from the window manager, whereas Windows will show it however you start your program). This can't be fixed easily in Linux: it needs the kernel to provide feedback to the window manager to inform it when a graphical subsystem program is in the process of starting up. Linux doesn't have such a thing as a graphical subsystem program, and the window manager is not a special process that could easily receive such feedback from the kernel.

I think a lot of people have missed the real point of ReactOS. Including the developers, by all appearances. Windows won't run under Xen paravirtualization. There's no reason ReactOS couldn't be ported to it, however.

FUD - ReactOs is legal

"In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally."

Oh, please... While I have no doubts MS will try to destroy ReactOs when it becomes too popular, the developers have made painstakingly difficult steps to ensure the proper reverse engineering is done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box_testing [wikipedia.org] ). They can sue all they want, they can't win this. (They can however make it an expensive legal wrangling...but then again, since it's open source, it's difficult to imagine any single lawsuit will be able to end the project).

Re:FUD - ReactOs is legal

They can sue all they want, they can't win this.

Except via patent claims, for which independent development is not an adequate defense.

memory footprint

OK, I don't need to know this, but I'm an old assembler-head: I remember how much SMALLER DRDOS was than MSDOS. Microsoft makes bloated things.

I want to know how much memory ReactOS takes up versus WindowsXP. Has someone run it who can trivially answer? Did these guys make a smaller, lighter windows?

Re:memory footprint

The zipped vmware image is 19 megs. So I'd say its a bit lighter ..

slides unavailable

But you can see them here: http://www.alex-ionescu.com.nyud.net:8080/wloo-tal k.pdf [nyud.net]

Lawyers

If ReactOS is a clean-room implementation, they probably can't do squat about it.

Still too much in the kernel

ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel. Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually had a cleaner kernel.

But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.

mimicking bill gates w/ win98

Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time.

hey, that sounds mighty familiar... [google.com]

Identical?

an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally.

I didn't get that from the screen shots [reactos.org]. The text inside of cpu-z go beyond their container. The okay and cancel buttons here [reactos.org] look as bad as 20 year old Unix, I'm thinking of CDE or Motif or whatever that is called. In fact, every single thing looks a bit off. Is that on purpose for legal reasons? ~Eric

Old Hacker Rule

> Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs.

With alpha or beta software, before giving a demo, test what you are going to do in private.
If it doesn't work, don't do it.

Too bad. The world would be a better place with ReactOS. What we need is a fat ass investor with loads of cash and a grudge against Microsoft to donate to this thing.

Linux has proven you can have a viable freeware OS. Now, while Vista makes everyones life miserable, there is an opening.

Windows clone? Why not go for OS X?

I would be much more interested in an OS X clone running on my PC, than in a Windows clone that I don't need.
Why clone a bad interface when you can clone a good one that many people would like to use?

mitigating lawyers

Aside from shooting the lawyers, the best way to mitigate the lawyers, I think, would be to get rid of the "MS GUI". That is, abstract it a little bit and make it an API-compatible theme engine, with the default looking different.

BSODs

Ionescu indicates that ReactOS is nearly 100% binary and API compatible with the Windows 2003 kernel, and that they are aiming for full Vista compatibility. Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs.

They better make it red, it'll be enough to convince people that it is a clone of Vista.

BSoDs

Why do BSoD's indicate that it is not ready? Bill Gates has shown BSoD when presenting an new OS, or is this an urban legend? It seem that they are somewhere around Windows 2000 right know.... I remember BSoD during installing W2K, so a fully compatilbe OS should show BSoDs during installing. Other companies sell proiducts in such a state....

Error in slides from Ionescu's talk

Ionescu's talk, page 8:
"A secure and reliable OS, written for C2 security level certification, and updated to B1 for Vista."

I am almost sure that this is wrong, because Windows Vista only implements mandatory integrity control (a derivate of the so-called "BiBa" model), but does not implement mandatory access control / information labeling as required by TCSEC B1, therefore not being eligible for B1 evaluation/certification.

my interest in it its by the lightweightness

lets just say i'm REALLY windows dependant,and this reactOS sounds like something much more lightweight than the real windows,and if this get secure,100% compatible with my apps and still be smaller than XP,i'm moving to it

Re:Red flag?

There was a minor scandal last year when the ReactOS project had to be suspended after it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code (which is available under shared source licenses in some contexts), and after a thorough audit the project continued.

The ReactOS people are taking the risk of copyright infringements very seriously.

Facts badly wrong in parent, mod down

The incident had nothing to do with Windows source and it was certainly not minor. It was due to certain parts having been implemented by the same programmer that had reverse-engineered them and was consequently "tainted" if the project was to adhere to its principle of black box testing only. That programmer was the very same Ionescu as here. The result of the unfortunate incident was that the programmer that found out about it (Hartmut IIRC) resigned from the project and the audit that is still going on was started. I read some of the discussion about it on the mailing list and apparently there was a great deal of concern about Ionescu's contributions since they came too quickly and were too good to be the result of just blax box testing (but not all is available for everyone so there could've been something else as well that resulted in the conflict between programmers - the whole project was to some extent in jeopardy, though). The only thing you're right about is that they take copyright infringement seriously but that has nothing to do with that incident.

Re:Red flag?

Actually what happened was someone alledged that someone on the development team had decompiled actual MS Windows dll and binary files, and included the resulting code into the ReactOS codebase.

Re:Red flag?

it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code

I hope they were able to return to society after thorough rehabilitation.

Re:Red flag?

They actually did a "code audit" a while back. You can get details here: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Audit [reactos.org].

Re:Solution to OS Disparity

Or combine self-deprecation and blandness to create GAROFFOLO!

Re:WTF???

it seems a pretty obvious answer to me.

put aside the fact that the softwares you mentionned are emulators, not OS,

it would steal users from windows.

imagine, having an OS the same as windows, friendly for computer illiterate ...but free, secure and open source...

need i explain more ?

Re:WTF???

...but free, secure and open source...

That doesn't necessarily follow. Duplicating a broken API will retain some of the security problems designed into the original OS.

Re:Red flag?

No. As others have pointed out, they did a thorough audit to make sure ReactOS wasn't tainted. Much of the project's source is actually derived from WINE (though with many differences, since ReactOS is an OS and not a compatibility layer), and last I heard the two projects have a friendly relationship and source and documentation goes back and forth between them wherever it can be helpful.

Re:Is it more stable than XP/Win2003?

Windows is not without its security vulnerabilities. I would never argue otherwise. However, XP is and has been blissfully stable for me for...5 years plus. My system runs 24x7...gets a lot of use for multiplayer games, teamspeak, photo/video editing, internet browsing, some office apps, occasional light development work...etc. I tend to reboot once every month or two - when I am forced to in order to add the incessant security updates caused by lazy ms programmers and lifeless twits who spank every time they find a new vulnerability. May not be a popular opinion here on /. but I've got no complaints about XP. It may be more about the fact that I don't run IE, outlook, most antivirus software, extra firewalls, etc. Been just fine whether proc has been intel or amd, no extra cooling (just the CPU fan).

Re:WTF???

we have VMware, we have 2007, we have everything necessary to run Windows programs without running Windows.

Pls post instructions on how to run Windows without Windows using VMWare. thx.

Re:Is it more stable than XP/Win2003?

Binary compatibility or not, why would you want to use MS's security patches on a non-MS product? You're far more likely to break it (I get the feeling that the ReactOS team actually bound-checks their code, unlike some Redmond fellows I can think of).

Or, how about this: It's not done yet. Keep your peanuts to yourself.

Re:WTF???

Well, having a product that actually does what these products claim to do might actually be helpful, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re:Red flag?

Morbid curiosity. Kind of like when you drive past a car wreck.

OSX Hacks DO exist (www.osx86project.org)

By using these hacks you can install OSX on a plain, non-Apple computer. The hacks circumvent Apple DRM and thus they are illegal in America (I dont know about other countries). There is a wiki about all these illegal activities, http://www.osx86project.org/ [osx86project.org]. Slashtot competitor, Digg, diggs everything about it.

Re:Is ....eescu a Hungarian name?

Sounds Romanian to me

-uso.

Re:WTF???

VMWare et al don't count. You still need a *legal* copy of Windows to install into the virtual machine. The main advantage of having something like ReactOS being API/Binary compatible is that you don't need to rewrite all the drivers, you can just run with the windows ones. Whether this is a good thing or not is questionable in itself given some of the dodgy 3rd party drivers out there.

Re:WTF???

What we DON'T have is a viable commercial product to compete with the PC/Mac control of the market for those of us who need to run professional programs. I mean no disrespect to Linux, and I plan to try out the UbuntuStudio as soon as it's out, but if you need to do video or audio/music production, for example, you're stuck with two platforms that continually underwhelm and have very little incentive to give users what they really want.

Both Microsoft and Apple have held the marketplace hostage for so long, that they can get away with ignoring the demands of their users, which is the symptom of a market out of whack. I want to run OSX on a box I build, but I can't. I want to run Vista without DRM, but I can't. I can keep going like this for a long time. It's the lack of serious competition that has kept the entire desktop market moribund for decades now.

We need another player, simple as that. We need a well-financed company to get into the desktop operating system game and stay there for a solid decade. Then we'll start seeing products and features that we REALLY want, at reasonable prices. Until then, it's going to be this silly charade of Bill and Steve, who we're supposed to believe are competitors, when they're really just enabling each other to abuse their customers, playing to their business partners in the entertainment-industrial complex. They may have done something at one time to move the status quo forward, but in the last decade they've just been a couple of jackoffs, doing zip for you and me.

Re:WTF???

Wine/cedega/crossover are application-level implementations. They allow you to run Windows applications. Reactos actually uses Wine code as well for this. Reactos however aims not only for app compatibility, but also for driver compatibility. That is, you can use the Windows drivers your hardware supplier gives you. In other words, if they achieve their goal, any hardware supported under Windows will automatically also be supported under Reactos, through the vendor-provided drivers. That's something you currently simply don't get with Linux.

VMWare is a virtual machine. It's completely useless without an operating system to run on. That is, if you want to run Windows programs with VMWare, you need some OS to run Windows prorams on. That is, VMWare doesn't help you with this problem at all (nor does Xen, QEMU, Bochs, VirtualBox, ...).

And 2007 of course doesn't help you even the least in running Windows programs without using Windows. :-)

Re:Is ....eescu a Hungarian name?

You remember wrongly.

Last names ending in -escu are typically Romanian.

As in, for instance, Nicolae Ceausescu.

Also, Hungarian is not a Slavic language (it's Finno-Ugric) and is in no way at all related to Bulgarian. Romanian is a Romance language, therefore related to French and Italian etc.

Re:Its A "Neat" Academic Exercise

1. Theres more than 1 Slashdotter, not all of which despise Windows.
2. Who said any of the ReactOS developers are Slashdotters?