We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.15!
This release offers Plug and Play fixes, audio fixes, memory management fixes, registry healing, improvements to accessories and system tools including Notepad, Paint, RAPPS, the Input Method Editor, and shell improvements.
We chose to release this version of ReactOS in honor of Eric Kohl’s first commit to the ReactOS code base, which dates back to 1999.
Eric Kohl is the oldest active contributor of the project, and this is his 26th ReactOS anniversary!
He has participated in the project as a developer since its beginnings.
This release is a culmination of the work of numerous contributors since 0.4.14 was branched in 2020.
This has been the largest release to date.
There are nearly 8 times more commits going into this release than in 0.4.14.
We are proud of the progress we have made, and are eager to continue with this growth.
Let’s dive in and see what’s new.
Plug and Play
Victor Perevertkin (Extravert-ir) has accomplished major rewrites to the Plug and Play Manager in the ReactOS kernel.
With these changes, ReactOS now has the ability to run more third party drivers and to boot from USB devices.
This also allows ReactOS to boot on chipsets with EHCI, OHCI, and UHCI controllers.
This work is a stepping stone to ReactOS being truly compatible with vendor drivers for the Windows operating system.
Johannes Anderwald (janderwald) solved an issue where the USB driver would enter an infinite loop when a USB device would not enter the ready state.
Fixing this infinite loop allowed ReactOS to boot on more hardware.
Audio
Thanks to the work of Oleg Dubinskiy, 0.4.15 features many audio improvements.
Oleg added support for more audio formats, looped playback of wave files, higher sample rates, and multiple output channels.
In addition, Victor Perevertkin imported the open source AC’97 driver from the Windows Driver Kit (WDK).
This enables sound out of the box in VirtualBox when the virtual machine is configured to use the ICH AC’97 Audio Controller and various motherboards from 2004 and earlier.
Memory Manager and Cache Controller
Section Objects have been refactored by Jérôme Gardou (zefklop) for better compatibility with Windows.
This fixes a long-standing bug preventing executables from starting in remote locations, such as network shares or virtua
