[rfc] removing the NDISulator

[Thomas Mueller]

> I'd like to remove the NDISulator. I've had many requests to update it to
> the latest NDIS version and support more of the 64 bit wifi drivers. But,
> to be perfectly honest, I have no desire to keep hacking at this. The world
> has changed quite a bit - we can port/reimplement drivers from Linux and
> other BSDs.

> So I plan on deorbiting it - I'll mark it deprecated during 11-HEAD and
> target to have it removed by 11.0-RELEASE.

> I'd rather see more of an effort writing new drivers and porting drivers
> from other operating systems.

> Thanks,



> -adrian

I too would like to see more effort writing new Ethernet and wifi drivers and porting from other operating systems.

But I would like to keep the NDISulator/NDISwrapper as a fallback.

There are still wifi adapters, Ethernet too, where there is no FreeBSD driver (AR9271 for instance), or the FreeBSD driver is buggy.

Realtek 8111E on MSI Z77 MPOWER motherboard is one case in point: good with NetBSD-current and Linux but not OpenBSD 5.3 LiveUSB or FreeBSD. 

I see FreeBSD 10.0-to-be has a bigger selection of drivers than 9.2.

I don't see improvements so far in 11-HEAD over 10.0-BETA1, but that's because 11-HEAD is at a very early stage.

Regarding NDISulator, I see that it seems nowadays that many MS-Windows driver packages, when unzipped, have setup.exe, some .ini files, some .cab and .hdr files but no .inf and .sys files necessary for the NDISulator.

Presumably these files are created/unpacked when the driver is installed in MS-Windows.

Tom