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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Well, one of the main goals of ReactOS is in fact to be able to use native Windows drivers.

That's what seems to get a bit weird as time passes. IIRC, they aim at being NT5.2 aka Windows 2003 compatible, but if they don't support newer driver models, that would rule out using any recent GPU, as nVidia doesn't exactly ship XP drivers for the RTX 3080. Curious what their current plans are for this issue.

Windows still has the same NT core, as you most probably know already. Yet, to be able compatible with NT 10, the ReactOS devs need to use the NT 5.2 > 6.0 > 6.1 > 6.2 > 6.3 > 10 path. Without 5.2, it's not possible and feasible to target further.

Implementing the XDDM driver model in 5.2 gets you nowhere towards supporting drivers in NT 10 as XDDM was completely removed in NT 8.2. This is true of a lot of things in the kernel, future versions are far from a superset of the previous ones like the userspace side of Windows often is. Particularly after nearly 2 decades.

Well, I am not the one who should talk about the goals since I am not a ReactOS developer. But I can tell that NT 8.2 do not exist. You probably meant NT 6.2, on which WDDM took over the business.

I assume it's because of the backward compatibility. But it also would be because of the fact that to implement 5.2 APIs, they need XDDM. Skipping right from 5.2 to 6.2 would cause a non operational state for a long time due to lack of APIs implemented and the WDDM. Windows 2000 had about 1400 full time devs and 800 full time testers. And ReactOS probably have 10-20 active contributors maybe. I don't know the numbers but there is a huge difference. And I can understand the requirements of an incremental development approach.

That's going to be an uphill battle. Graphics drivers of the kind old enough to run on ReactOS do real nasty things to the kernel like binary patching core components at load time. Raymond Chen sort of talks about this here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40...

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