[ros-general] [ros-announce] ReactOS 0.3.12 released

[Aleksey Bragin]

The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.12.

This is a huge release for the team, not just with regards to the  
number of improvements which this release holds but in terms of the  
leap forward architecturally, stability wise and in bringing some of  
the more modern aspects of the NT kernel into ReactOS.

It's been almost a year since the last release and whilst this is  
understandably excessive, it was required to stabilize the OS due to  
the nature of the work which was undertaken. Focus at the start of  
this release was on a single area, the trap handler mechanism, which  
resulted in a complete rewrite of this area. This brought with it the  
need for more changes which escalated into many areas getting an  
overhaul and many new technologies being developed and brought into  
the core. What resulted from this was a vastly more modern kernel  
containing code which had been exercised significantly less than the  
code it replaced. This triggered a large testing phase to bring the  
stability and compatibility to levels above that of the previous code.

During the preparation of this release, 259 bugs were fixed,  
including 61 regressions some of which originated from ReactOS 0.3.7.  
Ten of those bugs are more than 3 years old, with the oldest fixed  
bug being #969 (5 years old).

A heavily cut down list of some of the more major changes which have  
been going on in the past year is as follows:

•	Memory Manager - The memory manager continued to see much work as  
the ARM team replaced each component piece by piece whilst also  
maintaining the functionality of the old manager.  Although 0.3.12  
does not completely switch over to the new manager, what is obvious  
are the speed, stability and compatibility improvements of this new  
model.
•	NMI support - ReactOS can now handle NMIs with a Red Screen of  
Death, useful for capturing hardware errors detected by the CPU or  
Bus. Additionally, support for 3rd party NMI callbacks has been  
implemented, which is useful for certain server systems. Finally,  
support for generating a crash dump during an NMI is partly  
implemented, which can help when a machine is frozen or hung and an  
external NMI dump switch is used.
•	Trap Handler Rewrite - Almost all CPU faults, trap, exception, and  
system call code is now written in C instead of Assembly. Many legacy  
and/or deprecated code paths have been disabled and performance-heavy  
debugging paths disabled by default. Additionally, the x64 and ARM  
ports now share much more of this code. Finally, the code is much  
cleaner and can take advantage of compiler optimizations to generate  
the best possible code for the CPU instead of writing hand-crafted  
assembly that was specific only to certain CPU models. Work is  
ongoing to remove even more of the last remaining Assembly routines.
•	EMS - Support for Emergency Management System (or Headless) has  
been partially implemented. The boot flags documented by Microsoft  
are supported, and certain debug output is sent to the serial port as  
expected. Work is ongoing to provide the EMS logging capabilities and  
to move the existing legacy KDBG debugger over EMS. SAC (Special  
Administration Console) driver work is also in progress to compliment  
this.
•	PnP Compatibility - Various improvements have been done to increase  
hardware support and support for loading 3rd party drivers.
•	ACPI Improvements - The ARM team has implemented the basic drivers  
required for supporting batteries and 3rd party UPS/battery drivers,  
including support for the ACPI Composite Battery specification. This  
support is not currently enabled in this release because ACPI is  
still undergoing work.
•	New PCI-X driver - The ARM team has been slowly working on the new  
PCI bus driver. Previously, ReactOS was using a very simple and  
mostly stubbed PCI bus driver which lacked support for many real- 
world PCI bus features, PCI-to-PCI bridges etc.  With this new  
driver, compatibility on real hardware, not just virtual machines,  
should improve significantly, along with performance.
•	SxS support – Side-by-side code was added, along with loading and  
finding manifest files. It’s an important step forward to be  
compatible with modern applications which use this technology.
•	Pool Corruption Fixes - Perhaps the most serious of these suspected  
leaks were fixed thanks to combined efforts of key ReactOS developers  
utilising advanced methods including a customized version of QEMU  
virtual machine.
•	Timer and message handling rewrite - Incorrect handling of non- 
queued messages led to deadlocks in some applications which the  
message handling rewrite resolved. The timer implementation rewrite  
is also completed by this release which fixes many timer-related  
problems, most known is the “need to move mouse in order to download  
in FireFox”.
•	x64 build - While the x64 port is still in an early stage regarding  
the functioning of the kernel, most of the generic compilation issues  
are resolved and necessary core functionality implemented. These  
efforts have been merged back into trunk, so that trunk can be  
compiled for x64 target. With the help of automatic builds, possible  
breakages can now quickly be detected and resolved. Don't expect it  
to boot to GUI though!

The changelog <http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ 
ChangeLog-0.3.12> for 0.3.12 is also markedly different from previous  
releases, with an emphasis on conveying an understandable and concise  
summary of major changes in the release.  Thus instead of duplicating  
that summary here, we invite you to peruse its contents and see what  
has been accomplished.

Whilst the ReactOS team has still been attending many public events  
and conferences in various different countries, we’ve been out of the  
news due to what may appear as a quiet patch or a lull in activity.  
We hope this release will go some way to show that we’ve been busier  
than ever behind the scenes.
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