Any ReactOS users here?
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Apparently ReactOS is a free OS which intends to be binary-compatible with Windows. This could be useful for my game server shenanigans--most of my game server VMs are able to use Ubuntu but there are a couple games that require Windows.
Have any of you guys tried ReactOS and have any opinion about it?
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From Wikipedia:
ReactOS is an open-source operating system for x86/x64 PCs intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003
Server 2003?
I mean, it MIGHT work, depending on the game server executable's compatibility, but...why not just use Windows? Licensing costs?
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@e4tmyl33t said in Any ReactOS users here?:
From Wikipedia:
ReactOS is an open-source operating system for x86/x64 PCs intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003
Server 2003?
I mean, it MIGHT work, depending on the game server executable's compatibility, but...why not just use Windows? Licensing costs?
Yeah. I don't want to pay for additional Windows licenses, and key management can be a chore when server VMs end up being short-lived while evaluating new games or trying to get a configuration that actually works.
Server 2003 compatibility is probably close enough for most, since dedicated servers (typically) don't touch DirectX or the GPU.
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@mott555 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
since dedicated servers (typically) don't touch [...] the GPU.
Which is sad, since it seems like they could probably take advantage of that if you have one.
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@mott555 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Apparently ReactOS is a free OS which intends to be binary-compatible with Windows.
And I intend to be a billionaire, but I don't either of us are any close to our goals.
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@mott555 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Have any of you guys tried ReactOS and have any opinion about it?
Yeah, a few years ago, so things may have changed, but it seemed fairly unstable and prone to crashes I couldn't fix. But what would I expect, they're "starting from the ground up, with example pictures of the scaffolding that was used before" so-to-speak.
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Doesn't look like I can use it. I tried to install it to an ESXi virtual machine but the installer won't detect any hard drives. That's pretty bad if it can't detect the ancient stuff ESXi emulates for compatibility reasons.
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@mott555 Just found guides from 2007 indicating ReactOS only supports ATA drives, not SATA/SCSI. ESXi defaults to SCSI. I guess I'll try an emulated ATA drive, but it's been almost ten years, surely they've fixed that?
EDIT: NVM, SCSI is the only option in ESXi.
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@mott555 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Have any of you guys tried ReactOS and have any opinion about it?
All I remember from when I was 12 was that it was the first non-Windows OS I've ever had bluescreen on me repeatedly without doing anything unusual.
So maybe it's just error-message-compatible with Windows XP?
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React os win32 compatibility is about 15 years out of date. You are better using wine or a vm.
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@Magus said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Which is sad, since it seems like they could probably take advantage of that if you have one.
Why? Servers tend to not be the ones running physics engines or UIs. Without those tasks, the main jobs become communications, state management and persistence, and those aren't the sorts of loads typically associated with GPUs.
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Just buy or evaluate or pirate windows. ReactOS is a hobby toy, not something that can be used by real people.
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@mott555 Wine works much better than you would expect. Make sure to also install
wine-binfmt
for a more native look an feel.
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@dkf said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Magus said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Which is sad, since it seems like they could probably take advantage of that if you have one.
Why? Servers tend to not be the ones running physics engines or UIs. Without those tasks, the main jobs become communications, state management and persistence, and those aren't the sorts of loads typically associated with GPUs.
GPU is basically hundreds of computation units optimized for performing relatively simple operations on giant load of data. They're optimized for graphics processing, but they do very well in other tasks too (see: GPGPU). In some applications, a rack of GPUs is much more cost-effective for number-crunching than equivalent horsepower from CPUs. But programming for GPUs is a bit harder.
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@Gąska said in Any ReactOS users here?:
But programming for GPUs is a bit harder.
The main issue is that you really want to issue the same instruction to all the GPU cores at once (they're really a SIMD architecture). That in turn makes branching (but not iterating over an appropriately-sized collection) rather expensive.
But I really don't know what a game server would do with that sort of thing.
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@dkf said in Any ReactOS users here?:
But I really don't know what a game server would do with that sort of thing.
Maybe it could be used for physics... Nvidia's PhysX for example, but I don't think it is used in servers.
Even if you can simulate a big number of physical bodies - you can't send all that data through network.
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Does things like OpenCL help with GPU programming? I don't really know, but I thought the compiler does the hard stuff so you don't have to?
I don't really know, honest question.
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@lucas1 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Does things like OpenCL help with GPU programming?
I think so, but you still have to be doing exactly the same thing to lots of stuff at once, and that's just not what goes on in servers. The overall message is that GPUs are great for some types of workload and rubbish for others.
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Perhaps we need an 'Alt OS' thread or even a category. Probably not, but just thought I'd float the idea. I can just see all the Haiku, Syllable, MorphOS, and SkyOS fans coming out of the woodwork for that...
Filed Under: Is SkyOS still a thing, even? Last I checked it hadn't been updated since 2009 or so. quickly checks, Hmmn, last update 2013, not too dire but not exactly recent.
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@lucas1 said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Does things like OpenCL help with GPU programming? I don't really know, but I thought the compiler does the hard stuff so you don't have to?
OpenCL or CUDA let you put the program on the GPU, they both use a subset of C++ lang.
However, to get high performance on GPU, you need to design the algorithm accordingly.
There are different memories to use: big-but-high-latency global memory, small but fast per-group-of-cores memory and core registers.
A good algorithm involves moving the data to the right kind of memory to minimize time spent for accessing it.On the other hand, there are libraries offering high level operations, such as matrix calculations and various machine-learning tasks including especially neural networks.
For example with tensorflow, if you define the network structure and give the training data, it will train the network.
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@dkf said in Any ReactOS users here?:
The main issue is that you really want to issue the same instruction to all the GPU cores at once (they're really a SIMD architecture). That in turn makes branching (but not iterating over an appropriately-sized collection) rather expensive.
Many number-crunching algorithms can modified to get rid of branching. But it's not trivial.
@dkf said in Any ReactOS users here?:
But I really don't know what a game server would do with that sort of thing.
Depends on the game. Although most games aren't maths-heavy enough for GPGPU to be worth it.
BTW. Somehow, in my first post, I missed that we are talking about game servers. I thought it's servers in general.
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Server 2003 Binary Compatible?
Can it run .net apps? If so, I'm totally suggesting this to the guy who has inherited my "too risky to upgrade" servers.
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@Weng no
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@lucas1 Dammit.
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it can't reliably run win32 dude.
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@dkf said in Any ReactOS users here?:
The main issue is that you really want to issue the same instruction to all the GPU cores at once (they're really a SIMD architecture). That in turn makes branching (but not iterating over an appropriately-sized collection) rather expensive.
Hm, no branching at all? Does it have conditional execution of instructions? I believe ARM has something like that where instructions turn into NOPs if certain conditions are (not) satisfied.
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@mott555 Yes, I've used it on and off for a year or two, for stress-testing of small apps I've written mainly. Early alpha yet and obviously has a few issues. My experience is with VirtualBox and QEMU. TCP/IP stack can sometimes be a bit unstable. I've experienced a few issues with FAT32 volume corruption but VMs are cheap and wiped/restored easy enough. I've also used small VMs with NT4SP6a and Win2k. When NTFS R/W support arrives I think this will be a big step up.
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@ScholRLEA alt.os.what.thedailywtf
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@lucas1 Did I say it needed to be reliable?
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@bb36e said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@ScholRLEA alt.os.what.thedailywtf
BAD IDEA: Using subdomains as a navigation scheme.
Filed Under: 30.any-reactos-users-here.20685.topic.what.thedailywtf.com
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@Weng said in Any ReactOS users here?:
.net apps
It can indeed run .NET apps - up to .NET 4.0 is confirmed to work, but I don't think they've thoroughly tested every part of it.
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@lyptt said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Weng said in Any ReactOS users here?:
.net apps
It can indeed run .NET apps - up to .NET 4.0 is confirmed to work, but I don't think they've thoroughly tested every part of it.
Interesting. I'll have to try a build of this digital signage software on it.
Edit: wow that link wasn't even close!
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@PleegWat said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Hm, no branching at all? Does it have conditional execution of instructions?
I'm not 100% sure, nor even as much as 75% sure, but I think what you do is compute the values that you need and conditionally merge them without a branch (and yes, something like those ARM instructions would be a way to do it). Like that, all the cores can execute the same code yet get different results. Yes, computing some values that get thrown away isn't exactly efficient, but being able to apply the same operation across a significant chunk of an array of values at once is a compensatory benefit.
I really don't know how this fits in with memory management, which is another significant factor.
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@sloosecannon said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@bb36e said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@ScholRLEA alt.os.what.thedailywtf
BAD IDEA: Using subdomains as a navigation scheme.
Filed Under: 30.any-reactos-users-here.20685.topic.what.thedailywtf.com
Pretty sure he was going for a Usenet reference.
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Do reactos works better than wine?
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@error said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@sloosecannon said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@bb36e said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@ScholRLEA alt.os.what.thedailywtf
BAD IDEA: Using subdomains as a navigation scheme.
Filed Under: 30.any-reactos-users-here.20685.topic.what.thedailywtf.com
Pretty sure he was going for a Usenet reference.
I think he was
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@lyptt said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Weng said in Any ReactOS users here?:
.net apps
It can indeed run .NET apps - up to .NET 4.0 is confirmed to work, but I don't think they've thoroughly tested every part of it.
Interesting. I'll have to try a build of this digital signage software on it.
Edit: wow that link wasn't even close!
I was formerly involved with the ReactOS community during their 0.3.x days. You might want to consider reporting whatever bugs you encounter here - https://reactos.org/wiki/File_Bugs . This should help them along.
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@LoneRifle said in Any ReactOS users here?:
here
Wow, a near constant stream of commits (at least, based on the build server linked in the Wiki). Lets see what happens...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Lets see what happens...
Wow, first thing that happens is that we need to download more stuff...
This is on the second run, because apparently the default network adapter in VirtualBox (some intel whatever) isn't supported out of the box in ReactOS, so I switched it to some random whatever adapter. Confidence inspiring...
What was really amusing was that it formatted the target partition twice, first with Fat16, then Fat32. Wonderful.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
Confidence inspiring...
FFS It should be rather simple to ensure basic VMs hypervisors have their drivers available! What is this?!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
simple to ensure basic
Ah, in true Windows Fashion, ReactOS doesn't like being installed on anything other than C:.
The "Package manager" literally failed with no error or info when starting downloads if the system drive wasn't C:. This was the case even when the preferences dialog was updated to show the correct path (and it made the missing folder).
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
ReactOS doesn't like
Weird. The build I'm running seems to be highly intolerant of Disk I/O issues.
Weird things happen, probably because the disk cache finally runs out of buffer and programs don't react well.
We were doing so well too!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@LoneRifle said in Any ReactOS users here?:
here
Wow, a near constant stream of commits (at least, based on the build server linked in the Wiki). Lets see what happens...
Believe it when I say they've been at it for the past decade and a half or so.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
doing so well too!
Steam apparently works...
Sadly, no games due (probably because no actual graphics card...)
@LoneRifle said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@LoneRifle said in Any ReactOS users here?:
here
Wow, a near constant stream of commits (at least, based on the build server linked in the Wiki). Lets see what happens...
Believe it when I say they've been at it for the past decade and a half or so.
It's not unbelievable, just.... it doesn't appear on the front side that much has been accomplished since the last time I tried it. I know that's probably not the case, but it's the little things that nag at you, you know?
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@Tsaukpaetra If memory serves, one of the use cases they were intending to target was indeed Windows-based digital signage, so they may be interested in what you're trying to do. That's in fact one of the reasons why I replied =)
If you want to have a chat with them, they're on Freenode IRC, #reactos.
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@LoneRifle said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Tsaukpaetra If memory serves, one of the use cases they were intending to target was indeed Windows-based digital signage, so they may be interested in what you're trying to do. That's in fact one of the reasons why I replied =)
If you want to have a chat with them, they're on Freenode IRC, #reactos.
Maybe later, it's getting late for all the time I spent on a tangent. ;)
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Fun fact - Alex Ionescu contributed to this project. Alex was, of course, recently in the news when CrowdStrike presented on the hidden Linux subsystem in Windows 10.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
So wait... it does run Wine? Or, rather, it uses Wine's WIN32 API reimplementation libraries at least? Huh, so... why does it run less stuff than Wine, apparently? Because .NET stuff does work in Wine, after a fashion (last I checked 4.5+ was a bit iffy, but you could coerce it into working).
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@Onyx said in Any ReactOS users here?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Any ReactOS users here?:
So wait... it does run Wine? Or, rather, it uses Wine's WIN32 API reimplementation libraries at least?
It's the latter.
Huh, so... why does it run less stuff than Wine, apparently?
If memory serves, a lot of the subsystems that are available in Linux are missing in ReactOS, so part of the problem is building the OS up and trying to get Wine to run on top of it too. See this and this.