Dishwasher: Network card drivers

Sunday, 6 January 2013

Network card drivers

NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Windows XP network device drivers (for devices such as PCI cards, USB modems, and routers) on Linux operating systems. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs and dynamically linking Windows network drivers to this implementation. As a result, it only works on systems based on the instruction set architectures supported by Windows, namely IA-32 and x86-64.
Native NDIS drivers for Linux are not available for some network adapters because sometimes manufacturers will supply neither the drivers nor the information required to write them. However, NDISwrapper allows the use of Windows drivers, which are available for virtually all adapters that might be used under Linux.There are three steps: Creating a Linux driver, installing it and using it. NDISwrapper is composed of two main parts, a command line tool used at installation time and a Windows subsystem used when an application calls the Wi-Fi susbsystem.
As the outcome of an NDISwrapper installation should be some sort of Linux driver to be able to work with Linux applications, the first action the user does is to "compile" a couple or more of Windows files, and the NDISwrapper's version of Windows DDK into a Linux Kernel Module. This is done with a tool named "ndiswrapper". The resultant linux driver is then installed (often manually) in the OS. A Linux application can then send request to this Linux driver that automatically does the needed adaptations to call its—now—internal Windows driver and DDK.
To achieve this "compilation" NDISwrapper requires at least the ".inf" and the ".sys" files invariably supplied as parts of the Windows driver. For example, if the driver is called "mydriver", with the files mydriver.inf and mydriver.sys and vendorid:productid 0000:0000, then NDISwrapper installs the driver to /etc/ndiswrapper/mydriver/. This directory contains three files: