Earlier this week, the ReactOS team finally came live on its official X social media handle to share some news. The update, though, was hardly anything eventful other than confirming the project was not dead. However, there were a few positives too.
The team confirmed that booting with the Windows audio stack was now possible, although it was not problem-free. Second, it also informed us that LiveUSB or USB booting would be available soon. And finally, we were also teased with more updates soon.
As promised, new details have indeed been published, and there is quite a bit of it. LiveUSB support is now possible thanks to "major rewrites to the Plug and Play Manager in the ReactOS kernel." This also further improves third-party driver support.
With this new version, 0.4.15, a performance boost may be expected as there are improvements in caching and memory management. As a result, Microsoft's FAT file system import is now supported, which improves both performance and stability. The announcement blog post explains:
Because of improvements in the memory manager and cache controller, we can now import the open source Microsoft FAT filesystem driver from the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). This FAT filesystem driver is a huge improvement from the old one, which was slower and less stable. Additionally, external drives with FAT filesystem can now be properly ejected thanks to this new driver.
Speaking of caching improvement, Registry caching has been put in place this time alongside Registry healing and flushing. Flushing and healing are essential for regular Registry rewrites and fixing of corrupt Registry files, respectively. The idea is similar to file system upgrades, and as such, this should lead to better system stability and performance. ReactOS writes:
Registry healing and flushing are both designed to improve system stability when faced with an unexpected power outage or a crash. Healing applies appropriate fixes to a corrupted registry and flushing periodically writes registry changes to the disk, ensuring registry changes persist even if the system is not cleanly shut down. Caching improves performance when accessing it.
There are also shell improvements with this new update. The issue with incorrect desktop icons has been fixed, and taskbar icons have been made bigger. Native ZIP support is here too.
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Other improvements include audio enhancements with "support for more audio formats, looped playback of wave files, higher sample rates, and multiple output channels;" default audio output is now possible in VirtualBox in older motherboards with the ICH (Intel Controller Hub) AC’97 (codec) Audio Controller is.
Finally, there are improvements on the security side as well as in some of the system tools and accessories like the IME (input method editor), Notepad and Paint. You can read about it in full here in the official blog post.
A detailed "official" changelog for ReactOS 0.4.15 has yet to be published, but the "community" changelog already exists.
If you wish to try it out, head over to the downloads page on ReactOS' official website.
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