Abstract:
The open source operating system project ReactOS recently completed a significant underlying update. The development team has officially integrated the large-scale DirectX technology stack based on Wine 10.0 into the system. This is considered to be one of the biggest advances ReactOS has made in recent years in terms of Windows application and game compatibility.
ReactOS has been committed to creating an open source operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows software, games and drivers. The core goal of this update is to introduce the DirectX implementation of the Wine project that has been developed for many years into ReactOS, thereby significantly improving graphics compatibility and game support levels.
Justin Miller, the ReactOS developer responsible for this update, said that this work has been going on for a long time, with more than 230 hours of personal development time invested, and related optimization work is still continuing.
From the perspective of code scale, this update can be called a large-scale refactoring. The development team introduced approximately 498,000 lines of new code at one time, removed approximately 119,000 lines of old code, and cleaned up a large number of historical DirectX compatibility patches and special solutions.
The upgraded graphics system allows ReactOS to utilize OpenGL and Vulkan technology to complete DirectX command conversion. Among them, Vulkan support currently still requires a specific branch version or the Mesa software renderer to be used, but the overall graphics compatibility has been significantly improved. At the same time, the new technology stack has also improved its compatibility under Windows environments.
The development team stated that this update is expected to directly improve the running capabilities of hundreds of games. Many Windows games that were unable to launch, crashed easily, or had serious compatibility issues in the past are expected to be supported in the future.
Justin Miller revealed that this DirectX upgrade, combined with other patches still under development, is expected to unlock running support for hundreds of games. Even based on current results, some works that have been unable to launch for a long time have begun to receive compatibility improvements. For example, the classic role-playing game "Dragon Age: Origins" can now be successfully started and run on ReactOS.
This development is particularly important for the ReactOS community. For a long time, although ReactOS has continued to make progress in terms of compatibility with basic Windows applications, modern graphics API support has always been one of the main challenges facing the project. Insufficient DirectX compatibility has also become an important obstacle that limits the operation of Windows games.
The development team also revealed that with the completion of this underlying upgrade, ReactOS may gradually realize compatible support for DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and even DirectX 12 games in the future. While these goals are still far from being fully realized, this update has laid a critical foundation for subsequent development.
Industry observers believe that as the Wine ecosystem continues to mature and modern graphics technologies such as Vulkan continue to develop, ReactOS is gradually getting rid of the limitations of being able to run only some old Windows software in the past. If DirectX compatibility continues to improve in the future, the project is expected to become one of the most representative Windows-compatible operating systems in the open source community.
For this open source project that has been developed for many years, the reconstruction of the DirectX technology stack not only means an improvement in graphics performance and compatibility, but also marks an important step for ReactOS to achieve more complete Windows compatibility goals.
Learn more:
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/9352
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