RFC: removing ndis(4)

[Vladimir Kondratyev]

On 03.12.2020 06:32, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Dec 2020 at 19:28, Vladimir Kondratyev <vladimir at kondratyev.su> wrote:
>>
>> On 03.12.2020 03:12, Brooks Davis wrote:
>>> I'd like to propose that we remove the ndis(4) driver prior to FreeBSD
>>> 13.  It was a clever idea in the early 2000's when the market was
>>> flooded with 10/100 NICs with Windows-only drivers, but that hasn't been
>>> the case for ages and the driver has had no meaningful maintenance in
>>> ages[0].  I'd be a bit surprised if it worked at all today (it surely
>>> won't work with modern Windows drivers).
>>>
>>> To try to examine the popularity of ndis, I checked dmesgd.nycbug.org
>>> and there are 5 total entries with the most recent being 2007.
>>>
>>> The PC Card attachments are currently marked for deletion prior to
>>> FreeBSD 13.
>>>
>>> Unless there is surprising outcry I plan to add (and MFC) deprecation
>>> notices in about a week's time and remove the driver shortly thereafter.
>>>
>>> -- Brooks
>>>
>>> [0] I noticed today that part of the ndis 802.11 ioctl handler has been
>>> broken since 2005.
>>
>> ndis(4) was functional at least in 2015 and at that time it was the only
>> way to utilize BCM's wi-fi built in my "Asus EEEPC"
> 
> Everything has moved onto new NDIS APIs that we don't support.
> 

BCM4313 devices still have a Win-XP driver. No one tried to delete it
all-over-the-internet.