The Windows compatible ReactOS 0.4.10 has been released

The headline feature for 0.4.10 would have to be ReactOS’ ability to now boot from a BTRFS formatted drive. The work enabling this was part of this year’s Google Summer of Code with student developer Victor Perevertkin. While the actual filesystem driver itself is from the WinBtrfs project by Mark Harmstone, much of Victor’s work was in filling out the bits and pieces of ReactOS that the driver expected to interact with. The filesystem stack in ReactOS is arguably one of the less mature components by simple dint of there being so few open source NT filesystem drivers to test against. Those that the project uses internally have all gone through enough iterations that gaps in ReactOS are worked around. WinBtrfs on the other hand came with no such baggage to its history and instead made full use of the documented NT filesystem driver API.

Parallel to this effort was more basic work needed to expose the option to use BTRFS in the ReactOS installer and bootloader. It is all well and good for ReactOS to have a working driver, but the user ultimately needs to have a way to put it into use. The combined effort proved fruitful indeed, and users are invited to try out BTRFS support in 0.4.10. The newness of the feature will mean there will be the inevitable bug here and there, but it can only be with the community’s assistance in reporting them that the project can further improve.

  ReactOS 0.4.10 released