Community Changelog: 0.4.6 (Work-in-progress)

[ctasan]

Let's start! (Updated August 30, 2017)

Kernel:

-More work towards UEFI boot. (Alex Ionescu)
-Some work on Memory Manager, mainly leak fixes. (Thomas Faber)
-Fixed some hardware detection issues in FreeLoader. (Colin Finck)
-Improved bootsector checks. This fixes some dual boot issues. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-Fixed unreliability issues in hive generation. (Thomas Faber)
-Registry subtrees can now be properly exported as hive and re-mounted. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-FreeLoader can now load custom kernels and HALs. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-Fixed VMware Tools installation hanging. (Serge Gautherie, Sylvain Petreolle)

Win32 subsystem:

-Fixed some GDI leaks. (Thomas Faber)
-More work on printing support. (Colin Finck)
-Fixed some brush issues. (James Tabor)
-Fixed regression that caused slow drawing. (Mark Jansen)
-Improved shape creation and rendering. (James Tabor)
-Fixed some font breaking issues. (Katayama Hirofumi MZ, Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Fixed crashes with some font types. (Mark Jansen)
-Many fixes based on tests. (Thomas Faber)
-Implemented some missing functions to enable further DirectX improvements. (Sebastian Gasiorek)
-Added a stub user.exe to make DX9 installer happy. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-Fixed screen resolution rollback. (James Tabor)

Drivers:

-Fixed a data handling issue in CDFS driver. (Giannis Adamopoulos, Pierre Schweitzer)
-Implemented creating volatile registry keys for ACPI tables. (Peter Hater)
-Some more filter driver work. (Ged Murphy)
-Some fixes in SCSI port driver. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-Started implementing RDBSS and RXCE. This will enable SMB support in the future. (Pierre Schweitzer)
-Enabled UDFS driver again. Fixed various bugs and deadlocks. (Pierre Schweitzer)
-Added NFS driver. (Pierre Schweitzer)
-Major USB work: (THIS ENTRY TO BE IMPROVED)

-Replaced usbport and usbhub driver. (Vadim Galyant)

Shell:

-Fixed some leaks. (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Start Menu is now themeable. (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Some fixes in ntobjshex. (David Quintana)
-Fixed toolbar and taskbar size and resize. (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Some fixes for RDBSS/RXCE. (Pierre Schweitzer)

System DLLs:

-Fixed a logic issue in ntdll to fix idling when starting applications, e.g Libreoffice. (Thomas Faber)
-Fixed an issue in HAL to enable boot with more video cards. (Thomas Faber)
-kernel32: Work on the integration of the application compatibility framework. (Mark Jansen)

User-mode DLLs:

-Many leaks fixed in browseui and comctl32. More work on browseui. (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-More work on the application compatibility framework. The basics are working now, but disabled for this release (can be enabled in the registry if required). (Mark Jansen)
-Some fixes in Winsock 2 and related DLLs. (Peter Hater)
-Minor fixes on mpr, adding more functionality to net command. (Pierre Schweitzer)
-Major work on netapi32. (Eric Kohl)

Commands and utilities:

-Many improvements in console configuration. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-Many fixes in console fonts (and settings). (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-.msstyles files now can be opened in Display Properties. (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Added confirmation screen with timeout when changing resolution. (Eric Kohl)
-Various fixes in uxtheme: fixed some fonts, special buttons... (Giannis Adamopoulos)
-Remote Desktop: Fixed color corruption, implemented CryptoAPI functions. (Peter Hater)
-Some fixes in Paint along with improved theming. (Benedikt Freisen)
-Some work on International Settings. (Eric Kohl)

Tasks:

-ReactOS installation ISOs are now flashable to USB drivers, but still NO USB BOOT at the moment. (Colin Finck)
-Remote desktop application is synced to rdesktop 1.83. (Peter Hater)
-acpica updated to 20170629. (Thomas Faber)
-Synced ReactOS with Wine Staging 2.9. DirectX DLLs are again synced. DirectX sync is not included in release due to unresolved regressions (Amine Khaldi)
-Updated FreeType to 2.8.2. (Katayama Hirofumi MZ, Amine Khaldi)
-libsamplerate updated to 1.0.9. (Thomas Faber)
-libpng updated to 1.6.29. (Thomas Faber)
-libmpg123 updated to 1.25.0. (Thomas Faber)
-mbedtls updated to 2.4.2. (Thomas Faber)
-libtiff updated to 4.0.8. (Thomas Faber)
-Many fixes based on Coverity. (Victor Martinez Calvo)

Outside the tree:

-Preparation work for 1st stage GUI setup along with diverse improvements. (Hermes Belusca-Maito)
-GSoC 2017 is finished: NTFS driver improvements, Quick Launch toolbar and some system tray icons, RAPPS improvements, beginnings of USB 3.0 driver stack.

[PurpleGurl]

Are you sure that RDBSS will help with SMP support? The closest I find in the Microsoft docs is SMB. RDBSS is a kernel mode file system driver that seems to be network related. There seems to be nothing in there about multiple CPU and multiple core support.

And I cannot find what RXCE stands for or does. The search either returns Rexec or Excel stuff.

[dizt3mp3r]

Some of that list really whets my appetite. Looking forward to testing.

[ROCKNROLLKID]

Some of that list really whets my appetite. Looking forward to testing.

You can test right now. Just grab the latest nightly build.

List looks great. Giving credit should help boost morale for the developers.

[ctasan]

Are you sure that RDBSS will help with SMP support? The closest I find in the Microsoft docs is SMB. RDBSS is a kernel mode file system driver that seems to be network related. There seems to be nothing in there about multiple CPU and multiple core support.

And I cannot find what RXCE stands for or does. The search either returns Rexec or Excel stuff.

Fixed. Thanks!

[ROCKNROLLKID]

And I cannot find what RXCE stands for or does. The search either returns Rexec or Excel stuff.

I can't find anything either. Anyone want to share what this service is?

Also, about RDBSS and SMB, I am not a developer, but from what I understand from them, RDBSS allows the PC to communicate with hardware and connect devices, and I think your router and Lan card would be classified as a "connected device". So I guess in some way, it is probably necessary for SMB support, which is the service response for network file sharing. Al though, I think it is possible to get both of them to work without needing one or the other. Ultimately, this should also get CIFS support, too, as it tied with SMB service. As I said, I am not a developer, so I don't know if this is true.

[hbelusca]

And I cannot find what RXCE stands for or does. The search either returns Rexec or Excel stuff.

I can't find anything either. Anyone want to share what this service is?

Also, about RDBSS and SMB, I am not a developer, but from what I understand from them, RDBSS allows the PC to communicate with hardware and connect devices, and I think your router and Lan card would be classified as a "connected device". So I guess in some way, it is probably necessary for SMB support, which is the service response for network file sharing. Al though, I think it is possible to get both of them to work without needing one or the other. Ultimately, this should also get CIFS support, too, as it tied with SMB service. As I said, I am not a developer, so I don't know if this is true.

RDBSS: "Redirected Drive Buffering SubSystem", and RXCE (according to official MS headers): "Redirector file system Connection Engine", the latter providing file system services for RDBSS.
To put it simple, it can be used to have access to remote shared folders.
See Pierre Schweitzer's tweets here, for some examples: https://twitter.com/HeisSpiter/status/8 ... 7500271616 , https://twitter.com/HeisSpiter/status/8 ... 5164547072

[middings]

RDBSS stands for Redirected Drive Buffering SubSystem.

SMB means Server Message Block. SMB is a network file sharing protocol commonly used by Microsoft Windows systems.
See also: SMB/CIFS and Samba.

RXCE.lib has something to do with Microsoft's Installable File System (IFS).

(I searched the forums for a recent version of PurpleGurl's list of acronyms or terms. I could not find it.)

[PurpleGurl]

The acronyms list is not mine, though I've been maintaining it:

https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Abbreviations
---

Anyway, I didn't mean to hijack the thread. Can is doing a good job here, so let's support him.

[middings]

Thank you for the tip, PurpleGurl. I failed to think of looking in the ReactOS Wiki for the list of abbreviations, terms, and acronyms.

[mauro451]

Let's start! (Updated June 3, 2017)

Win32 subsystem:

-More work on printing support. Explorer can now show a dummy printer in Printers folder, dummy printer is now preselected in print dialogs. (Colin Finck)

Hi, what does "dummy printer" exactly mean?
Is it a real basic output printing system or else a printing emulation producing a file as final output?

Thank you

[LuxenDM]

I think it lets you print withot crashing when no printer options are available. Dunno if it creates a file or anything yet.

[milon]

There's been a LOT of WINE syncs lately, covering many/most systems of ROS. Is that included in the above ?

[PurpleGurl]

There's been a LOT of WINE syncs lately, covering many/most systems of ROS. Is that included in the above ?

It doesn't appear he included that yet. That would likely go under tasks. The sad part is that the syncs caused at least 1 serious network regression. Apparently, it ties in with NTLM. It seems the replacement code utilizes that more, and we don't have that yet (except for the Samba workaround).

[ROCKNROLLKID]

It appears that Wine development has sped up a little. It looks like updates are pushed every 2-3 times a month now, when it use to be only 1-2 times a month.