[rfc] removing the NDISulator

[John Baldwin]

On Monday, October 21, 2013 6:29:24 pm Adrian Chadd wrote:
> The NDISulator is a crutch from a time when there wasn't _any_ real
> alternative.
> 
> There are plenty of alternatives now. What's lacking is desire and
> person-power. But the datasheets are there, or the vendor code has been
> released, or there's linux/otherbsd drivers.
> 
> Leaving it in there is just delaying the inevitable - drivers need to be
> fixed, ported, or reverse engineered.
> 
> This is going to upset users in the same way that eliminating any other
> transition/sideways compatibility layer upsets users. But as I said, the
> path forward is fixing up the lack of stable drivers, not simply supporting
> some crutch.
> 
> If there are drivers that people absolutely need fixed then they should
> stand up and say "hey, I really would like X to work better!" and then
> follow it up with some encouraging incentives. Right now the NDISulator
> lets people work _around_ this by having something that kind of works for
> them but it doesn't improve our general driver / stack ecosystems.

Eh, having taken a stab at porting the bwl blob already, I would strongly
oppose removing NDIS.  If you do that I will just stop using my netbook
with a Broadcom part altogether as I wouldn't be able to use it to try to
test bwl changes.  The NDIS thing is a bit hackish, but it is quite useful
for a lot of folks.

-- 
John Baldwin