ReactOS Arwinss to use more Wine code

Posted by twickline on Jan 19, 2010 1:03 PM EDT
Wine-Reviews; By Tom Wickline
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ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

Briefly, what was done:

  • gdi32.dll - source code is nearly unmodified from Wine, but compiled in ReactOS tree, into a real PE DLL.
  • user32.dll - source code is nearly unmodified from Wine, but compiled in ReactOS tree, into a real PE DLL.
  • What about Wineserver, you would ask? SERVER_START_REQ and related macros are rewritten to perform a syscall to win32k.sys (more about win32k.sys below). Server protocol is the same, but of course many requests aren't need.
  • winex11.drv - this is the one if you want X Server to be your interface. This is unchanged Wine source code, again compiled inside a ReactOS source tree into a PE DLL
  • winent.drv - an alternative user/gdi driver, which mostly forwards all calls into a kernel mode graphics engine located in win32k.sys (which is compatible with Windows video drivers, so all acceleration could be used).
  • win32k.sys - kernelmode counterpart of the new Win32 subsystem, contains graphics engine, user server which is based on a small part of platform-independent Wineserver source code adapted to kernelmode, and a simple window manager which calculates visible regions for windows and manages window showing/hiding.

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