During his contract with ReactOS Deutschland e.V., Victor will primarily work on the storage stack, a long neglected piece of ReactOS. He plans to finally turn scsiport into a Plug & Play aware driver and fix kernel Plug & Play bugs in the process, thereby improving USB storage support and compatibility to Windows storage drivers.
If time permits, stretch goals include continuing his previous work on integrating Google’s Kernel Address Sanitizers into ReactOS and fixing booting with our APIC-enabled HAL.
It’s always good to see such a small and alternative operating system project hire a developer, even if only for a short time.
Awesome news. ReactOS definitely needs some paid developers working on it. USB is such a critical part of modern computing, lack of USB support/stability is a killing blow for alternative OSes like ReactOS
Smart money would be to get NTFS support some more love. This is supposed to be Windows compatible.
Never understood why such a bone deep part of Windows has been given the “get around to it” treatment in ReactOS.
End users don’t care how tedious to implement or proprietary file system is. They want something that can make the transition from Windows easier (and without corrupting their files).
Hi, I’m a former NTFS dev (who is not involved with ReactOS at all.)
I suspect that NTFS in ReactOS is a substantially harder task than NTFS in other platforms. Other platforms need to implement the on-disk file system parts, and need to express files through the relatively simple file system APIs that POSIX supports, which can only describe a subset of what NTFS can do. Doing this on ReactOS means doing all of that but also implementing all of the Windows API support, and all of the associated functionality to support it. If ReactOS aren’t looking beyond 2003, they can ignore things like transactions (in the CreateFileTransacted sense), but things like USN are important if the goal is application compatibility, and no other implementation ever had to think about it.
While it may be true that “end users don’t care”, project maintainers always need to consider the cost and benefit of every undertaking.
malxau,
You’ve shared your experience in the past, and as always I appreciate your insights!
I could be mistaken, but I don’t think most regular users need those features even on windows itself. I imagine that the vast majority of people who want NTFS on reactos only need generic file system functionality. I tried to lookup applications that used NTFS USN journals (none come to mind) and I found forensics software and backup software, which makes sense. Still, I think there are far more pressing features to implement & refine before working on NTFS’s relatively specialized corner cases.
I can only speak for myself here, but what I would like to use reactos for is to be able to run the windows applications I still need to run without having to keep a windows PC around. It wouldn’t be my daily driver, it wouldn’t need many of the fancy features in windows, just a basic file manager and the ability to run 3rd party desktop software. I use linux full time these days but I’m still tethered to windows for some jobs and applications and that’s where reactos would come in handy if it were stable.
It’s not a smart move, and it gets basically 0 value for the work put into it. First you would need a valid Windows license merely to have the NTFS partition in the first place, something that would overcomplicate development and testing. Then why would anyone put an alpha operating system that’s prone to crashes and disk corruption and their windows disk? It’s much too soon for any of that. Then a lot of file system security features are not implemented, and using a non-fully documented filesystem is much worse than adopting ext or brtfs to implement those features. You’re asking for something that sounds nice to have, but in reality offers 0 value at the moment.
dark2,
IMHO the whole of reactos is in risky legal waters given the project literally exists to copy the windows APIs. I don’t believe it’s a forgone conclusion that reactos could survive a prolonged legal attack. It’s not a real threat to microsoft today as perpetual alpha/beta software, but I imagine a production-ready reactos would have to lawyer up.
Regardless, what makes you say you need to have a windows license to have an NTFS partition? I believe you could create & access NTFS file system without infringing microsoft’s copyrights or using it’s APIs. Patents are a different story, but a lot of those are probably expired.
Well, I think it would have value, but it ought to be a lower priority. I consider application support more important than file system support. For example, the lack of .net is a bigger problem for me than the lack of ntfs.
https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17183
Some people may have a specific reason to use NTFS, which is fine, but personally I don’t care much about the file system so long as it works reliably.
.
What nonsense is this… that is almost certainly not true for the very sake of interoperability reasons.
Also there are non windows implementations of NTFS you can use to create NTFS partitions…. no need to ever even run MS’s code to use NTFS.
You can create a NTFS partition with Linux to begin with.
I could also run 7zip in my business and use it to extract .rar files, but if the people who license that .rar extraction out hear I’m doing that commercially I’ll be in a good bit of legal trouble. Just because you can do it as an individual that’s not worth going after legally, doesn’t mean an organization can do the same.
dark2,
You are assuming that 7zip infringes copyrights and/or patents, but supporting the rar format does not automatically make either of these true.
Moreover, rarlab itself has put out source code for unrar under very permissible terms here, which is the code used by 7zip.
https://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm
So, go right ahead and use 7zip to extract those archives if you want, rarlab is ok with it.
As for NTFS, I don’t necessarily think there’s anything microsoft can do to block 3rd party implementations once any patents run out. This may be one of the reasons why reactos targets older versions of windows.