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⇱ ReactOS Making Progress On Windows WDDM Driver Support - Phoronix


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ReactOS Making Progress On Windows WDDM Driver Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 13 October 2025 at 06:33 AM EDT. 19 Comments
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:

šŸ‘ ReactOS WDDM


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.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.