The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an “open-source Windows” ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers.
WDDM is the modern graphics driver architecture for Microsoft Windows and rolled out starting with Microsoft Windows Vista. While the ReactOS focus has been on a Windows Server 2003 baseline, they ultimately need to support WDDM drivers to remain relevant with newer hardware.
Thus some efforts have been underway on enabling WDDM driver support within ReactOS. There is sucess in ReactOS communicating with WDDM drivers:
Open-source developer “The_DarkFire_” commented:
“When I first got BasicDisplay.sys loading in ReactOS I noticed how forgiving WDDM truly was. I realized I could escalate this further than I’d anticipated. It turned out these vendor drivers are very willing to accept being started just for their display for example.
I was quickly getting more drivers to show some kind of display out, allowing ReactOS to power modern monitors at their full resolutions and refresh rates. But I quickly was getting limited not by our implementation of Win32k but instead our support for hardware itself.”
Those wanting to learn more about this early work into WDDM driver support on ReactOS can do so via the ReactOS.org blog.
