if_ndis (4)

Leading comments

 Copyright (c) 2003
	Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>. All rights reserved.

 Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 are met:
 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/if_ndis.4freebsd".)

NAME

ndis - NDIS miniport driver wrapper

SYNOPSIS

options NDISAPI device ndis device wlan

DESCRIPTION

The ifconfig driver is a wrapper designed to allow binary Windows[rg] NDIS miniport network drivers to be used with Fx . The ifconfig driver is provided in source code form and must be combined with the Windows[rg] driver supplied with your network adapter. The ifconfig driver uses the ndisapi kernel subsystem to relocate and link the Windows[rg] binary so that it can be used in conjunction with native code. The ndisapi subsystem provides an interface between the NDIS API and the Fx networking infrastructure. The Windows[rg] driver is essentially fooled into thinking it is running on Windows[rg] Note that this means the ifconfig 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 ifconfig driver loads, it will create sysctl(3) nodes for each registry key extracted from the .INF file.

The ifconfig 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.

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_ether4, ifconfig(8), ndis_events8, ndiscvt(8), ndisgen(8), wpa_supplicant8

"NDIS 5.1 specification"

HISTORY

The ifconfig device driver first appeared in Fx 5.3 .

AUTHORS

The ifconfig driver was written by An Bill Paul Aq wpaul@windriver.com .