User Ideas for ReactOS

From time to time, users propose ideas for ReactOS. Here's a place to put them. We might never use most of them, but here is a place to showcase them.

Base MSHTML renderer on Webkit or Blink

This would be beneficial for not only us, but Windows too. Then ANY browser can take advantage of the fastest renderer code, even very tiny ones such as OffByOne or Dillo, perhaps making them faster than Chrome. Currently, there are no plans to do this, since we currently use Gecko. Even that is likely better than Trident as used by Windows XP/2003. Now if someone else were to write such a wrapper for Webkit or Blink, perhaps to use in Windows, and maybe use Gecko code to fill in what's missing that mshtml.dll might need, then we might consider it.

Bidirectional firewall

Windows XP only has an inbound firewall, while Windows 7 has a bidirectional firewall. A lot of people don't understand the value of an outbound firewall. An inbound firewall protects you from inbound attacks like hackers, unexpected incoming packets, and programs with backdoors loading things into your system. An outbound firewall helps in the event you already have malware, to reduce the chances of compounding the problem. It would help keep your PC from leaking sensitive information about you and from attacking other machines. It is a second-line defense. It doesn't keep you from being hacked or infected, but can help minimize the impact.

DirectX 10, 11, 12, Vulkan, future renderers

XP is currently only capable of running DirectX 9 and OpenGL. Many games are now using more modern renders, like DirectX 11, 12 and Vulkan. Using the latest rendering techniques will attract a lot of gamers to ReactOS, since gaming is a major reason why people use Windows.

Flatten registry writes

This involves using a small area of memory to track the last so many unique writes to the registry. The idea is to check pending writes against this list and to not write again if they are here. So any redundant requests are acknowledged without any further action. This helps prevent unnecessary disk accesses. That will likely help preserve the life of NAND-based SSD drives and possibly reduce hard drive contention and slightly speed up overall disk I/O.

Host Outreachy

Outreachy is an internship program that is very similar to GSOC. However, it is a twice a year program and is offered to members of specific minority groups -- mainly women, transgender folks, and those with African, Asian, Pacific Islander or Aboriginal descent. While there was a concern raised in the forums about the possible political implications, it is not conceivable as to how that would be an issue for us. Yes, there is a clear agenda behind the motivations of this program in terms of the organizers, but that doesn't mean that the interns would share such attitudes. More than likely, they just want to code and get the skills needed to find good jobs. So my (PurpleGurl (talk)) proposal is to try it at least once. If the completed work is not suitable or more time is spent arguing or being disruptive, then we could simply not apply to participate again. However, if they turn out great work, it wouldn't matter if they were Green! If this works, we could have up to triple the benefit that GSOC currently provides and have a greater chance of acceptance into at least 1 program per year.

Modern hardware compatibility

Windows XP lacks a lot of future hardware compatibility, such as NVMe support for SSDs, trim support for SSDs, and AMD's new Ryzen processors. Without modern hardware compatibility, we exclude a big portion of Windows users.

Registry firewall

This means monitoring the most abused registry hooks. For instance, if something tries to write to the Run key in the registry unexpectedly, the user would get a prompt. This behavior could be turned off in the control panel (and/or a registry key or Services console). This could be taken further by automatically adding the blocked items to a blacklist. Taking that even further, there could be an option to automatically block a given key for the rest of the session without further prompting. That way, if loaded malware rapidly attempts to add keys back, then our feature won't render the system useless for the rest of the session.

This could be combined with the registry access flattening idea. Instead of preventing redundant writes, the presence of the bad key in the flattening list would prevent it from being written at all.

"Remove" CSRSS

Due to debate, length, untenability, and obsolescence, this has been moved to it's own section.

Security access for apps

In properties app can change permission to access to the functions of reading and writing files, Internet access, as well as to the registry. This approach allows users to restrict access to questionable applications without additional software and be truly protected (how on Sandboxie app). [CORE-11548]

Segregate mostly read-only files from frequently updated files

This is a way to get some gains from using SSD drives while helping to extend their lives. Files that are only occasionally written to can go on the SSD while frequently updated files can go on the mechanical hard drive. You can manually do this in Windows if you copy the files, play with the registry locations, and change some settings. What would be nice would be a wizard to automate this. That way, you can keep things like registry hives, temp files, cookies, the swap file, and search indexes off of the SSD drive and do so in a rather safe manner. However, it is possible that Optane and similar NV memory will become mainstream before anyone considers this, thus decreasing risk.

Use the GPU as a computational resource

Modern PCs use video cards which have computational abilities. There are also coprocessor cards that are similar to video cards in that they have hundreds, if not thousands of shader engines, but they are not used to process graphics. It would be nice if such abilities were recognized and made available for more general computing tasks. For instance, what if the kernel needs floating point operations? So far, the proposal has been to use an FP emulator for this, due to it being problematic to switch states and this requiring high overhead. Using emulation is also costly and slow, though less likely to cause race conditions under these circumstances. Now what if that could be offloaded to the GPU or to a supercomputing adapter if one exists?

As for writing such code, it will likely be tricky as there are multiple standards and the operations are greatly different than what a general purpose CPU would provide. You'd likely need some sort of abstraction layer and your own GPU kernel. Then you might need alternative versions of APIs and some sort of scheduler or arbiter to make sure the most appropriate device is chosen for that moment. Other disadvantages would be increased power consumption, heat and noise (from cooling fans). Often, using the computational abilities requires the video card being in high performance mode.