[rfc] removing the NDISulator

[Adrian Chadd]

On 23 October 2013 15:31, Vincent Hoffman <vince at unsane.co.uk> wrote:

>  On 23/10/2013 18:35, Eitan Adler wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>  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.
>
>  I doubt most people prefer to use the ndisulator over a native driver.
> However, many people don't have the skills, time, or money to provide
> the incentives you are talking about.  At this point ndisulator
> provides a means to an end: working wireless and it isn't causing
> significant strain on the project in terms of development effort.
>
> Our end users are not always developers and I think removing this
> feature will hurt more than it will help.
>
>
>
>  As an end user, the main issue I have is that according to the manpage it
> supports ndis 5.1
> According to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Specification this
> is the version supported by
> Windows XP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP>, Server 2003<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003>,
> Windows CE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE> 4.x, 5.0, 6.0
>
> As you might guess most new devices wont be coming with drivers for XP, so
> does this mean I wont be able to use drivers for a recent windows version
> (my understanding is that it will but happy to learn differently)
> If this is the case and there is no active development on it, a gradual
> depreciation over the 10.x series is probably a good idea. If however its
> likely to support current drivers/devices it does have a place (I've used
> it once or twice in a pinch.)
>

This is why I'd rather us bite the bullet now and deprecate it, versus have
it in there and put in the work to upgrade it to handle NDIS 6.x drivers
with the Microsoft wireless extensions stuff.



-adrian