The FOSS project known as ReactOS, devoted to making an open source distribution that’s compatible with Windows binaries, has introduced a new SATA driver and received a Verisign certificate.

The ReactOS Foundation which owns the rights and trademarks to the ReactOS project will now be able to certify its releases and digitally sign drivers for installation on x64 binaries:

The other development is the obtainment of a digital codesigning certificate from VeriSign, which will allow the Foundation to digitally sign releases that it makes, authoritatively identifying them as being from the ReactOS project. This should remove any ambiguities regarding official releases of binaries that the project makes and should prevent anyone from faking an official release.  Not only that, but as many people are aware, 64bit versions of Windows require that all drivers to be signed if you want to use them.

The new SATA driver dubbed UniATA still has outstanding performance issues, but it is faster than its predecessor and offers broader compatability.

In the future, we’ll of course want to actually fix this as not having DMA imposes a performance hit. In the mean time, the major blockers with UniATA are now gone and it has been switched over as the default ATA driver for ReactOS.

Correction, 2:37 PM 6/7/2009: The original run of this update indicated that ReactOS was a Linux project; this is obviously incorrect. We have since amended the article to read “FOSS.”