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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.
...but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs ... the Windows emulation seems perfect !
How about a link to ReactOS in the summary?
^^
ReactOS would still be unsupported and untrusted in business, and it's proliferation would only add to MSFT's dominance of the market.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not until all the malware works too!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They might want to look up what "identical" means. There is still a very long way to go. (I could have put a traditional screenshot up there too, from W2K or even W95, and it would still be true.)
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.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How about another link?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
They actually did a "code audit" a while back. You can get details here: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Audit.
This has inspired me to create a ground-up 100% reimplementation of the AOL client, identical in looks and functionality. Wish me luck!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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?
--E--
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.
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.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Or combine self-deprecation and blandness to create GAROFFOLO!
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.
"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 ). 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).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
it seems a pretty obvious answer to me.
...but free, secure and open source...
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
need i explain more ?
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
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?
But you can see them here: http://www.alex-ionescu.com.nyud.net:8080/wloo-tal k.pdf
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.
This poo is cold.
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).
If ReactOS is a clean-room implementation, they probably can't do squat about it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ah, WINE (rather specifically) Is Not an Emulator. It's a compatibility layer, as are all its derivatives.
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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.
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Well, having a product that actually does what these products claim to do might actually be helpful, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Wine
Is
Not
Enough
brilliant!
The only reason I run Windows is to run Audible.com and iTunes. If I could get an OS to run these apps in a virtual machine under Linux, I would be Windows free.
A compatibility layer by any other name, would still be unable to run many Windows applications.
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.
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.
hey, that sounds mighty familiar...
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.
Morbid curiosity. Kind of like when you drive past a car wreck.
how tf did they get a 2.4ghz Pentium II?
I blame geof's speakers.
...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.
The MSFT people are smart enough that they may catch stuff that other people don't. Plus they have a huge install so they will hear of problems long before anyone running Wine or ReactOS would. That said, I do think it's a good thing if it works as well as they said (eventually) and the source is out there for perusal. Some people will end up using it to try and find new holes to attack, but a lot of people will also find problems. So after a few years it could be much more secure than XP. Plus we all know that Microsoft will drop support for XP as soon as they can get people moved to Vista. It's going to take a while due to the hardware requirements of Vista but it will happen. With ReactOS people can still keeping going with XP compatability as long as they want.
VMWare on Linux.
This project can become very interesting for companies that rely on old equipment and software, which I think is a huge market.
With Microsoft changing the driver model and the API of Windows with Vista, a lot of applications and devices will not be supported by the latest and greatest from Redmond. This means no security patches/bugfixes for old equipment and software.
If ReactOS can emulate Win2k/XP, it could be used as a secure and supported replacement in those environments.
Illegal Mnemonic Character
* Stay Simple *
> 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.
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/. Slashtot competitor, Digg, diggs everything about it.
"Except via patent claims, for which independent development is not an adequate defense."
Well, in Europe we still don't have (enforcable) softwarepatents. Though it being an Open Source project, I'm not sure under what jurisdiction it falls.
But you make a good point: more proof that softwarepatents suck.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Okay... so we have a virtual machine... what runs on that virtual machine?
Sounds Romanian to me
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Windows with snapshots! Being able to save and load the vm's state makes Windows much more tolerable.
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?
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.
Anonymity of the internet is responsible for the views expressed in my post.
Ah, the genius! But where are modpoints when you need them...
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It is Romanian which is a Romance language, not a Slavic language. I suppose that would account for the similarity to French last names.
Here is some information about naming conventions all over the world (anchored to Romania):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name#Romania
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
But then how is that:
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.
Not saying that is a bad solution, but that still doesn't allow you to run Windows programs without windows.
Windows with snapshots is still Windows.
Are you referring to this discussion:
0 6-January/007393.html
....Any source code produced by direct reverse engineering should be treated in exactly the same way as any other non-free source code useful for study and understanding of the system, but not permitted for inclusion in ReactOS."
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/20
Here's a quote from one of the messages about the standard policy, which helps to put the discussion in perspective:
">From Section C of the ReactOS IP Statement (C. Copyrights of Others)
By default, Wine translates Win32 calls to something a POSIX operating system can handle. With a Win32-aware kernel, the translation layer is much thinner. Wine only has to handle the user-space portion of the call, and not the adaptation between one kernel-space and another.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
/* Waste time to look like real Windows */
int i;
for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Actually that is an acceptable practice. Long as the person disassembles and the writes documentation on what they learned. And a person that was never exposed to the disassembled code creates a different implementation. That method would be clean everywhere, and in some places person A and B being the same would be acceptable as well.
1. Theres more than 1 Slashdotter, not all of which despise Windows.
2. Who said any of the ReactOS developers are Slashdotters?
Most decent compilers would optimize that out. The ReactOS team would have to be *much* more clever to achieve the typical MS-Windows slowdown. If they programmed the whole thing in C#, it might just work.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Well in fact it is an emulator, regardless of the silly name. It's just not emulating a machine, which is what people tend to think of emulators doing.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You have a bit of a skewed view there.
An emulator pretends to perform all the actions given to it, within a virtualized environment, whether it's a machine or an API. A compatibility layer provides real services between a piece of software and the underlying subsystem. The primary differences are speed (emulation is slower) and stability (a maliciously or badly written program, run in a compatibility layer, can do as much damage as a native one. Fortunately, Linux users are less likely to run programs as administrator/root), and compatibility (hardware emulation can achieve 100%, as it's not chasing a moving target).
You may not care about the fundamental difference, but I assure you that your employer (assuming you have a job) would, given the appropriate information and choice.
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Actually, I was talking about breaking the system by introducing foreign code. ReactOS tries for binary compatibility. That doesn't mean you can go dropping system files between them (like updates from MSFT). You're very likely to break something.
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No, in the genral case an emulator pretends to be (or more accurately, "imitates the behavior of") something else. It doesn't pretend to do anything, it actually does something. A foo-emulator is a standin for foo that isn't actually foo, but which is (ideally) indistinguishable from the outside.
Your "fundamental difference" is fundamentally founded in nothing. Emulation isn't necessarily slower -- it just usually is, because that's the way the universe works. And your point about security is just due to the design of "emulators" that you're familiar with -- i.e. hardware emulators, the most common "emulators", which are in fact entire virtual machines.
WINE doesn't emulate a machine; it emulates a set of libraries. It isn't Win32 but it does its best to function just like Win32 (so that the apps can't tell the difference). It is, as such, a "Win32 Emulator" in the general sense of the word.
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....
> I can honestly say I've never had any issues installing Windows...
:-P
Well, I can honestly say I haven't any issues in the last 8 years installing Windows... and I even installed it once during this time, for a 2 week-long use!
I foresee Windows will continue to give me no problems in the coming years -- except maybe my curious daughter asking me to install it on one machine to play some idiotic game. But she's having a lot of entertainment with Linux, why spoil her fun?
OTOH, at work I have a marvellous 12-year old PC with Windows 98. Reboots by the minute. No, it's not funny. If installing Windows is easy, let me make this point clear, and it's not an opinion -- it's a fact I've learned the hard way: Windows is not easy to use, despite what marketeers parrot everyday.
Linux is a lot more easier. And it's free and free. So, to all who say "you get what you pay for", I reply: "the fool and his money are soon parted".
The kernel itself is stable. The OS is not. The problem isn't between the screen and the keyboard, it's between the kernel and the screen. The kernel may still be running, but if the only way you can do anything is through a remote terminal... the kernel isn't crashed, but the OS is.
I'm not even counting having to restart explorer.
Romanian is of Romance stock same as French and Spanish, though with a bit of a Slavic bent (as French has a slight Germanic bent).
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
If IBM, one of the biggest companies out there, does not dare enter the competition on a product that itself created, then nobody can...
Of course there is another way out: a small group of well-financed programmers that use a more advanced programming language than C could produce a decent O/S not in a decade, but in a year.
I think it'd be interesting to create a full POSIX subsystem on top of the ReactOS kernel. Microsoft has already proven that this sort of thing is possible in their architecture with Interix. You could then get the best of both worlds by running a GNU userspace (GNU/ReactOS?) on top of it. Presently the only real options are Windows+SFU (which works okay, but is not a complete solution) or Linux+Wine.
There are some good design decisions in the NT kernel. Lots of the crap MS has piled on top of it is sub-par, but the core kernel design is on the whole very clean and malleable.
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.
I couldn't agree more.
I want a computer for running Audio programs (sequencer, VST software synths, WAV editor etc.) that is good enough for pro use. I don't want anything else at all running on that machine beyond basic network functionality (so I can upload/download files to a server for backup etc.) That means no internet connectivity, no "anti crapware", no unrequired services, and especially no DRM crap. I want every CPU cycle possible to be available for Audio work. In fact given the current rate of development of flash drives sod the network connectivity - I'll do my transfers vis USB drives.
Currently the best tools I have available (Logic Audio 5.5.1, Sound Forge 7.0, Native Instruments Battery, Native Instruments Massive etc. etc.) all work on my Windows 2000 installation. A version of ReactOS that could run these tools will be enough for me to ditch Windows altogether.
The rest of my computing I can do happily on Linux but the Audio/MIDI tools currently available aren't a patch on the Windows ones (yes I have tried them thankyou, I am aware of dyne::bolic, agnula, Ubuntu Studio, Rosegarden, MUSE, etc. and NO they are not yet as good as the Windows tools)
So roll on ReactOS 1.0 !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Read your own quote. RUN WINDOWS *PROGRAMS* WITHOUT RUNNING WINDOWS. Pls return to high school for English comprehension studies.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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
Sorry, kiddo.
My wife and I use XP at home. It's been five years, it only crashed when I had driver problems with a wireless card.
At work, we have laptops and workstations running 2000 service pack 4 and XP. Likewise, they only ever fail with hardware problems.
But the servers? 2000 Server and 2003 Server - hit them hard enough with constant loads, and down they go. Or they're technically still up, but they stop responding to pings and keyboard input until you get tired of waiting (10 minutes, half an hour, 24 hours) and reboot.
You can run the CPU of Linux servers at 100% all day for days at a time, and user interface responsiveness is noticeably slow but they'll keep right on trucking.
Think Bagdad (Louisiana) and Baghdad (Iraq) sound the same. I think they (them Louisianians and them Iraqians or Iroquis or whatnot) are both frenchlike languages (they speak French in Louisiana don't they? It sounds just like that. It's like the Quebec of Texas, right?)
What, you dare not believe me? You should, for
I am a professor of geography at the ELTE, Budapest and a respected linguist and a%@2+gist at the Uni. of Bucharest, too.
Sincerely, Essjay
I could just reply that you are a moron, which would be deserved given the ignorance you display in your obnoxious reply, but instead I'm going to be polite and point out that VMWare provides no facilities to run Windows programs that aren't already available on a PC without VMWare.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
An emulator pretends to do something, in the sense that what its doing doesn't actually occur at a hardware level, merely at a logical one. If you change screen resolution, for example, the window size changes rather than your screen. If you move your mouse, the movement is translated into the logical movement. It may have passthroughs to hardware, but the action is abstracted down to the emulated hardware, then passed onto the real stuff.
The short of it is that an emulator is something that pretends to be hardware.
A compatibility layer works rather directly on the hardware, or at least through the host system's HAL, with as little as possible going on in between the application and the low-level interface.
Of course, you add to the confusion by adding Virtual Machines, which aren't emulators either; They're actually even more direct than a compatibility layer; the rather directly provide managed low-level machine services to a separate operating system, and aim to get as close to the real hardware as possible.
I think the confusion here comes from the fact that you're using the canonical definition of 'emulator', rather than the jargon term that would be appropriate for this discussion.
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It's not my fault that I'm speaking English. And everything you've just said is still horribly confused and wrong. You're discussing one kind of emulator, and one (incredibly limited-scope) kind of virtual machine, and pretending that the words don't mean all of the other things that you're utterly ignorant of. But go ahead, reply, and show the world a little more of what you don't know.
Windows with snapshots is still Windows.
Oh Stewie...
Wow, but you're a dick. I'm pointing out the differences in what projects that claim to be one, the other, or the new third are. It's not my fault if you can't comprehend a difference in scope.
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FOSS Windows clone that runs 95% of windows software and LOOKS like mac os x, while having all the advantages of Linux and the FOSS world (beryl, firefox, etc. built in?). Which one day may be possible with ReactOS as the core. I mean, other than the nice Aqua GUI is there something THAT great about OS X that is not already implemented in Linux or somewhere else? Personally I think beryl+3dworld completely trumps most other GUIS anyway....
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.