Re: [rfc] removing the NDISulator

> The NDISulator is a crutch from a time when there wasn't _any_ real
> alternative.

> There are plenty of alternatives now. What's lacking is desire and
> person-power. But the datasheets are there, or the vendor code has been
> released, or there's linux/otherbsd drivers.
 
> Leaving it in there is just delaying the inevitable - drivers need to be
> fixed, ported, or reverse engineered.

> This is going to upset users in the same way that eliminating any other
> transition/sideways compatibility layer upsets users. But as I said, the
> path forward is fixing up the lack of stable drivers, not simply supporting
> some crutch.

> If there are drivers that people absolutely need fixed then they should
> stand up and say "hey, I really would like X to work better!" and then
> follow it up with some encouraging incentives. Right now the NDISulator
> lets people work _around_ this by having something that kind of works for
> them but it doesn't improve our general driver / stack ecosystems.



> -adrian

Sometimes a crutch is needed.

But it would be desirable to have a means for using a driver from Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD.

Sometimes the FreeBSD driver is buggy, like re with Realtek 8111E on MSI Z77 MPOWER motherboard.

I couldn't checkout FreeBSD 10-current source tree from 9.2 amd64 or 9.1-STABLE i386 USB stick, but was able to checkout and update the source tree to build FreeBSD 10-current (now 11-current and 10.0-BETA1) after updating my NetBSD-HEAD amd64 USB-stick installation and building subversion from pkgsrc.

I could checkout the ports tree too but would not be able to make fetch.

A driver might work with FreeBSD but fail temporarily in a later source revision due to a new bug.

So it's good to use FreeBSD native driver when possible but have ndis for fallback.

One problem with NDIS is that now it seems that running "unzip -l" on the Windows driver shows no .inf and .sys files.

One can then try from ReactOS or Wine, and even if the installation of Windows driver doesn't work, it might possibly yield .inf and .sys files.

I never tried that so am not making any bets.

Tom