NDIS Wrapper Bounty

Written by Karl vom Dorff Wednesday, 18 July 2007 04:32

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It would be nice to bring some network support to Haiku via all the wireless chipsets the NDIS Wrapper supports! Easier than rewriting wireless networking drivers from scratch, an NDIS wrapper for Haiku would compromise by building a wrapper around the networking kit and allow Windows drivers to simply be used without porting or rewriting a single line of code. Hugo Santos performed a similar task for Haiku with a wrapper for FreeBSD's network stack. Also, an NDIS wrapper was developed and shown operational in the commercial BeOS-based derivative Zeta.

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Many vendors do not release specifications of the hardware or provide a Linux driver for their wireless network cards. This project implements Windows kernel API and NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) API within Linux kernel. A Windows driver for wireless network card is then linked to this implementation so that the driver runs natively, as though it is in Windows, without binary emulation.

With ndiswrapper, most miniPCI (builtin), PCI, PCMCIA (Cardbus only) or USB wireless network cards work in Linux with x86 or x86-64. Although ndiswrapper is intended for wireless network cards, other devices are known to work: e.g., ethernet cards, USB to serial port device, home phone network device etc.

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