The team behind ReactOS, the NT-compatible open source operating system, have released ReactOS 0.3.10, which comes with many improvements aimed towards making it easier to run ReactOS on real hardware.
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Member since:2007-07-20
Member since:2005-12-23
Windows comes with a myriad of base drivers which include both generic drivers and support drivers.
If ReactOS didn't implement these generic drivers then you wouldn't even be able to install ReactOS, let alone run it.
For example, without filesystem drivers you would have no way of installing the OS into the disk.
Without bus drivers none of your pci cards would work.
Without video drivers you would have no screen.
Without network drivers you wouldn't be able to get on the internet to update your OS with your prefered drivers
etc, etc.
There are core drivers which must be present and are not available via 3rd party means. These provide the basic framework and serve as a base for your 3rd party mini filter drivers to attach to. So for example the network stack is built up of various drivers like tcpip, afd, tdi, etc. We then provide the generic drivers for chips like pcnet and ne2000 so your network works 'out of the box' as they aren't freely available elsewhere.
You are then free to install your driver of choice at a later stage if you so wish.
Other examples are things like the base USB drivers (ohci, uhci, etc), serial drivers, parallel drivers, i8042prt drivers, pci drivers, isapnp drivers, acpi drivers, floppy drivers, etc. These simply aren't available anywhere to download so we must implement them as they are core to the OS.
Member since:2006-02-15
As was said, there needs to be a certain amount of basic drivers in there that you can actually install ReactOS at all. But what the other poster didn't say and I thought to mention:
There are a lot of drivers in Windows and it would be very easy to just grab those, make sure they work in ReactOS and then bundle them with it. But the problem is that those drivers are proprietary and as such you are not allowed to ship them with ReactOS. Would be good if the drivers were free, ReactOS devs could cut quite a lot of development time then :/
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Member since:
2007-04-23
Why is it that they're writing drivers?
Surely it would make more sense to improve their implementation of windows to the point that it can use existing windows drivers, of which there are literally millions...