ReactOS Forum

ThFabba wrote: ↑Thu Aug 23, 2018 12:06 am That's fantastic, please do it!

I'm not being sarcastic. ROS does not suffer from a lack of ideas, it's just that all devs already have over-full TODO lists. So if you think something is a priority, please go ahead and work on it. It would be much appreciated.

It's not a bad idea, I'll try to do it. But I doubt it will be quality code, it's going to be more like a a proof of concept. I have experience in emebedded programming, but my NT kernel programming knowledge is close to zero.

If it's going to be such a big problem to have Ethernet debugging over most cards, we could opt in for some other, less conventional methods. Perhaps a secondary harddrive could be used as a debug dump? Once the folk over at ReactOS are done with the audio, we could probably pull off audio debugging. It'll work basically like dialup. PC Speakers are a thing, perhaps certain beeps could alert us to an issue generically? This would help a lot in my case because I don't know what's failing here. We got options, the issue is figuring out how to do all of this.

lelekx wrote: ↑Thu Aug 23, 2018 4:25 am It's not a bad idea, I'll try to do it. But I doubt it will be quality code, it's going to be more like a a proof of concept. I have experience in emebedded programming, but my NT kernel programming knowledge is close to zero.

Debugging over Ethernet in the proof-of-concept format would be nice too!

Missingno50 wrote: I'm turning this into a general forum post where we can just discuss features that we want to see happen in Hackfest LONG in advance.

I hope I am not misunderstanding the idea of this announcement, but this reads like an invitation for a feature wishlist discussion. If so, my top-most wishes are (without order):

• Getting HD Audio Driver to work.
  Rationale: Sound on real hardware.
• Getting either the GMI 915GM Video Driver to work or the ATI Mobility Radeon 2600 Video Driver to work.
  Rationale: Getting the native resolution on my old Compaq 8510p notebook. Doing tests with 1024x768 instead of the native 1200x800 is rather uncomfortable. Both drivers failed to install with ROS 0.4.9. The Radeon 2600 driver can be "installed" manually, but only almost works - after reboot it shows the desktop for the split of a second, then everything is black.
• Bring LibreOffice 5.x in a usable state.
  Rationale:In 0.4.9 Writer was so slow it was unusable (tested in VBox), and having this running well on ROS is imho equally prestigious as running MS Word.

Concerning the driver tasks: Since I am not a C/C++ programmer I cannot help with programming. All I can help with is providung sample drivers on request (different versions) and doing testing work similar to what I have done prior to the last releases.

I want almost all Intel Chipset Drivers to work.

1) Real support for swap, actualy reactos can not use swap if i use more memory that my systeme, reactos freeze and crash
2) What would be nice would be to support the latest version of firefox or chrome
actually reactos support maximum firefox 48, i think good idea tu support firefox 60 with quantum engine

win3x wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 10:15 pm 1) Real support for swap, actualy reactos can not use swap if i use more memory that my systeme, reactos freeze and crash
2) What would be nice would be to support the latest version of firefox or chrome
actually reactos support maximum firefox 48, i think good idea tu support firefox 60 with quantum engine

Firefox 60 would probably be really slow till ReactOS supports multi processor. But it would still be nice to have a up to date web browser.

Dreaming of work for other people to do is a killer of open source projects. Such chatter in these forums drives ReactOS's serious developers to avoid visiting these forums.

Here's a link to Google's archived copy of a historically interesting Usenet post. That post was the seed that became a fabulously successful open source project. Notice that the author of the post wrote "I'm doing..." and "I've currently..." instead of "I'm thinking about..." or "I want...".

middings wrote: ↑Sat Aug 25, 2018 2:07 am Dreaming of work for other people to do is a killer of open source projects. Such chatter in these forums drives ReactOS's serious developers to avoid visiting these forums.

+1000500
Plus, when one calls paging a swap.

Ahem.
It appears people didn't get this forum like I had hoped. It's not a wishlist, it's so that people can provide an idea, and then have others tell them why it may or may not work out, and hopefully drive attention to the ideas that would in theory work out great when they are asked for on the next Hackfest. I shall now demonstrate.

• Ethernet debugging.
  Rationale:RS232 is a grievance on newer motherboards as they no longer have that port.
• PnP work
  Rationale:Very few motherboards support PS/2 and fewer have a port that isn't both. It's about time that USB devices got a massive boost in the development department.

matthiasbasler wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 7:20 pm

• Getting HD Audio Driver to work.
  Rationale: Sound on real hardware.
• Getting either the GMI 915GM Video Driver to work or the ATI Mobility Radeon 2600 Video Driver to work.
  Rationale: Getting the native resolution on my old Compaq 8510p notebook. Doing tests with 1024x768 instead of the native 1200x800 is rather uncomfortable. Both drivers failed to install with ROS 0.4.9. The Radeon 2600 driver can be "installed" manually, but only almost works - after reboot it shows the desktop for the split of a second, then everything is black.
• Bring LibreOffice 5.x in a usable state.
  Rationale:In 0.4.9 Writer was so slow it was unusable (tested in VBox), and having this running well on ROS is imho equally prestigious as running MS Word.

HD Audio driver - Sounds nice and all until you realize how long it would actually take. Many motherboards still support AC97 as it turns out. Pretty sure as is you can import the HD Audio driver from another OS and having it done so compared to the rest of your list, this may be the closest to being actually done and has the highest chance of being done next Hackfest out of this entire list.
Edit:So it appears I'm just an anomaly when it comes to this stuff, and my 9 boards that come from after 2010 are just exceptions. Even then, ReactOS tends to only work on older hardware anyways so it may just be useless to work on the HD Audio driver.
GMI 915GM/Radeon 2.6K Video Drivers to work - Too much of a personal thing, we need more ideas that could help many people at once instead of this. If we focused on personal things entirely, ReactOS would probably still be stuck in the NT 3.51 era.
LibreOffice 5.x support - Didn't Microsoft Word work on ReactOS already? Even so, this is probably on the planned list somewhere in there, but it's more than likely just an imperfect kernel replication they'll nail later when making the OS more stable.
This guy did a good job and put rationales, like I had hoped. Literally everyone else didn't and I am not very fond of that.

mrmajik45 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 9:26 pm I want almost all Intel Chipset Drivers to work.

Intel Chipset Drivers - Rational and all, but would take too long to work on. Hackfest is only about a day's length if I remember correctly, so even if they did focus on fixing drivers, they would only get a few of them fully functional, and that time could be spent on doing more things like font fixes or fixing regressions that happened.
Edit:I don't know how I fucked up this bad but Hackfest is not just a day long, this last one was a week long. How do I screw up knowledge so simple!?

win3x wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 10:15 pm 1) Real support for swap, actualy reactos can not use swap if i use more memory that my systeme, reactos freeze and crash
2) What would be nice would be to support the latest version of firefox or chrome
actually reactos support maximum firefox 48, i think good idea tu support firefox 60 with quantum engine

Buddy, fix your English spelling please. It was a little hard to understand you there.
Support for Swap - Well that's obvious, paging is not a thing as far as I know. Probably something that won't be acted upon with Hackfest anyways unless someone got hyped up on cocaine and jet fuel. Also, it's paging, not swap.
Support for modern browsers - Not happening at Hackfest. That's just a given. Unless they finally finish this current version of the NT kernel, NOPE, no improvements happening there. They cannot support modern browsers just because they wanted to, it's based on how developed their version of the NTOS kernel is. Currently, it's bad. Sidenote: Quantum is a massive side in the neck and causes cancer.

Anyways, time to kill myself by critiquing my own points.

missingno50 wrote:

• Ethernet debugging.
  Rationale:RS232 is a grievance on newer motherboards as they no longer have that port.
• PnP work
  Rationale:Very few motherboards support PS/2 and fewer have a port that isn't both. It's about time that USB devices got a massive boost in the development department.

Ethernet Debugging - We've already come to the conclusion that programming so many ethernet drivers would be too much of a problem to do in one day, and thus cannot be done at Hackfest and may never even be done.
PnP Work - Out of the group of suggestions that this forum received, this one is the most needed and the most likely to happen at the next Hackfest. USB is far superior in all ways and hell, VGAL builds with their overhauled PnP stacks are amazing. It's about time the main git of ReactOS gets its much needed love for Plug n Play stacks. However, there may be something wrong with this. Please, do oppose me if there is something completely wrong with what I'm asking.

I don't think the video driver thing is too personal. If their drivers don't work, other video drivers might not work. Thus fixing the kernel support of drivers or whatever is going on should help many.

As for me, I haven't tested in a while, but it got to where I could not use it due to USB drivers hanging the system, and after replacing the motherboard in this one, disabling USB in CMOS is not an option, since it has no PS2 sockets. So having working USB drivers is a must for the majority of users.

And another thing I'd like to see is more hardware compatibility. There is no benefit in needing to install an emulator to use ROS (other than for development and testing), when you can just run Windows, or run Linux with Wine. So, more work on HAL or whatever component needs to be done. From what I understand, HAL is the "master driver" and like a low-level shim engine to make up for common hardware differences. So it makes up for the differences between various PC-compatibles and is supposed to present a common hardware interface to the rest of Windows. So our HAL likely needs to be more robust and better able to test and adapt to the hardware. But I'm just guessing, as I'm not a dev.

Then I'd love to see multicore support. That ties in with the HAL thing and hardware compatibility in general. That might have to wait since it can introduce regressions.

If you want a tabular form:

• Continued USB compatibility and stability.
  Rationale: Buggy USB may prevent booting and disabling USB devices is not an option for everyone.
• Improved hardware compatibility and kernel bugfixes
  Rationale: So more people can reliably boot into ReactOS.
• Multicore support.
  Rationale: To be more compatible with Windows XP+, improve performance, and highlight certain bugs.

If you want multi-core support from the next Hackfest then you will have to supply the hacker, PurpleGurl. Hbelusca explained here that the developer team lacks someone able to write a suitable multi-core hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and kernel modifications.

edit 2018-08-31:

Missingno50 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 16, 2018 5:10 pm...provide information why we could or could not do this next feature so we don't get swamped with suggestions that simply won't work or are too hard.

(I think by "we", Missingno50 means the ReactOS developers.) I didn't mean to be sarcastic in my reply to you, PurpleGurl. If I was acquainted with someone who has the necessary know-how then I would invite that person to take a look at ReactOS.

I consider the above comment to be a violation of rule #1 and the hijacking rule, and will likely elaborate elsewhere. I only threw ideas out there, with no demands nor expectations whatsoever. It would be nice if any of those were worked on in the slightest the next go around, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, big deal.

knowing people tell, that multiprocessor support is the hell of complexity in the OS development.

middings wrote: ↑Thu Aug 30, 2018 2:39 pm

Missingno50 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 16, 2018 5:10 pm...provide information why we could or could not do this next feature so we don't get swamped with suggestions that simply won't work or are too hard.

(I think by "we", Missingno50 means the ReactOS developers.) I didn't mean to be sarcastic in my reply to you, PurpleGurl. If I was acquainted with someone who has the necessary know-how then I would invite that person to take a look at ReactOS.

You are correct. I dunno why I said we there, but yeah, ReactOS developers. I had plans to try to chip in a few things but decided my skills were terrible and not good enough to be of use to ReactOS.

PurpleGurl wrote: ↑Thu Aug 30, 2018 7:02 am

• Continued USB compatibility and stability.
  Rationale: Buggy USB may prevent booting and disabling USB devices is not an option for everyone.
• Improved hardware compatibility and kernel bugfixes
  Rationale: So more people can reliably boot into ReactOS.
• Multicore support.
  Rationale: To be more compatible with Windows XP+, improve performance, and highlight certain bugs.

• Continued USB compatibility and stability.
  No counter here. I already pointed out that this is needed, and it's already being solved. From what I can figure out, it appears VGAL is PRing some USB stuff.
• Improved hardware compatibility and kernel bugfixes
  No counter here. These will happen over time so I don't know why you'd put on a list for HACKFEST items.
• Multicore support.
  Counter: While all of this would be GREAT, such a task would be so complex it probably wouldn't even be worked on in Hackfest 2019. Even then, no doubt this is still far from on the priority list.