NAME

     ndis — NDIS miniport driver wrapper

SYNOPSIS

     options NDISAPI
     device ndis
     device wlan

DESCRIPTION

     The ndis driver is a wrapper designed to allow binary Windows® NDIS miniport network drivers to be used
     with FreeBSD.  The ndis driver is provided in source code form and must be combined with the Windows®
     driver supplied with your network adapter.  The ndis driver uses the ndisapi kernel subsystem to relocate
     and link the Windows® binary so that it can be used in conjunction with native code.  The ndisapi subsystem
     provides an interface between the NDIS API and the FreeBSD networking infrastructure.  The Windows® driver
     is essentially fooled into thinking it is running on Windows®.  Note that this means the ndis driver is
     only useful on x86 machines.

     To build a functional driver, the user must have a copy of the driver distribution media for his or her
     card.  From this distribution, the user must extract two files: the .SYS file containing the driver binary
     code, and its companion .INF file, which contains the definitions for driver-specific registry keys and
     other installation data such as device identifiers.  These two files can be converted into a kernel module
     file using the ndisgen(8) utility.  This file contains a binary image of the driver plus registry key data.
     When the ndis driver loads, it will create sysctl(3) nodes for each registry key extracted from the .INF
     file.

     The ndis driver is designed to support mainly Ethernet and wireless network devices with PCI, PCMCIA and
     USB bus attachments.  (Cardbus devices are also supported as a subset of PCI.)  It can support many
     different media types and speeds.  One limitation however, is that there is no consistent way to learn if
     an Ethernet device is operating in full or half duplex mode.  The NDIS API allows for a generic means for
     determining link state and speed, but not the duplex setting.  There may be driver-specific registry keys
     to control the media setting which can be configured via the sysctl(8) command.

DEPRECATION NOTICE

     The PC Card attachment of this driver is scheduled for removal prior to the release of FreeBSD 13.0

DIAGNOSTICS

     ndis%d: watchdog timeout  A packet was queued for transmission and a transmit command was issued, however
     the device failed to acknowledge the transmission before a timeout expired.

SEE ALSO

     altq(4), arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), ifconfig(8), ndis_events(8), ndiscvt(8), ndisgen(8),
     wpa_supplicant(8)

     NDIS 5.1 specification, http://www.microsoft.com.

HISTORY

     The ndis device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.3.

AUTHORS

     The ndis driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>.