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What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as Linux?
by konschubert 9y ago
What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as Linux?
- dfox 9y agoIt uses it's own opensource implementation of Windows NT kernel.
- lnx01 9y agoAnd a lot of code from Wine too
- mschuster91 9y agoNo, it's a reverse engineered Windows. I believe that due to copyright issues it even is a fully clean-room developed implementation, which means that it's not based on MS documentation or on decompiled source code.
- rossy 9y ago> which means that it's not based on MS documentation I think looking at MS documentation is okay. You're allowed to look at MSDN for Wine development[1]. Since the projects share code, you're probably allowed to do so for ReactOS as well. [1]: https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines
- e12e 9y agoSee eg: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/include/ntoskrnl.h https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/incl...
- SllX 9y agoThe ReactOS kernel is their own, clean room reverse engineered to be compatible with the NT kernel. Also just a side note, Linux isn't exactly a UNIX fork either. Linux was developed from scratch on a MINIX host, which in turn was another OS designed to be UNIX-compatible but did not actually use any UNIX code. To put it another way, it's Unix-like two generations removed, but definitely not something you could call a fork. That might seem like a small detail to you but SCO vs IBM says otherwise.