ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Making Good Strides On SMP CPU Support

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.

Most exciting with the ReactOS newsletter update is seeing a lot of activity around SMP support for better handling modern multi-core processors. ReactOS is seeing its Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) support "extensively improved" thanks to one of its developers. There is now support for processor freezing and switching, basic support for inter-processor interrupts (IPIs), debugging, and other SMP-related enhancements.

While it's great that ReactOS is seeing a lot of SMP work recently for better handling modern multi-core CPUs, the status update notes:

"It is worth noting that SMP is still heavily under development and there is no exact estimate of when the multi-core support will finally be ready, so stay tuned for more updates!"

ReactOS has also seen progress in being able to compile and run from a GCC 13 compiler built environment. In order for updating the GCC compiler toolchain that assembles ReactOS, the GCC 13 work is ongoing.

ReactOS has also been working to update the user-mode modules used from the Wine project. In turn this should boast much better application compatibility with new ReactOS builds relying on the updated Wine modules.

ReactOS has also seen work on asynchronous network connection support, audio improvements, a new ATA storage driver, and other improvements. There have also been new developers that began contributing to the ReactOS software project to help in accomplishing new tasks moving forward.

More details on these recent ReactOS operating system improvements via the ReactOS newsletter.