ReactOS Pushes Out A New Operating System Release

The developers behind ReactOS, the free software operating system working to re-implement the architecture of Microsoft Windows XP/2003 and attaining binary compatibility with existing Windows software, is now out with a new release. The ReactOS release came about one year ago, but out this afternoon is the brand new ReactOS 0.3.12.

With this being the first release in such a while, ReactOS 0.3.12 carries many changes. Among the ReactOS 0.3.12 highlights include an improved memory manager (faster, greater stability, and compatibility improvements), NMI support, a rewritten trap handler, support for the Emergency Management System, PnP compatibility, ACPI improvements, a new PCI-X driver, SxS (Side-by-side code) support, pool corruption fixes, and a rewrite of the timer and message handling.

This release of ReactOS also has improved support for its x64 (64-bit) build where it can now successfully compile, but it's still not at a comparable state to the 32-bit ReactOS.

The release announcement for ReactOS 0.3.12 is available at ReactOS.org. This release does not contain the heavily leveraging of Wine or the Direct3D 10/11 Gallium3D state tracker for providing support for this Microsoft graphics API.