NAME

       ndis — NDIS miniport driver wrapper

SYNOPSIS

       options NDISAPI
       device ndis
       device wlan

DESCRIPTION

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

       The ndis 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.

DEPRECATION NOTICE

       The PC Card attachment of this driver is scheduled for removal prior to the release of FreeBSD 13.0

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_ether(4),  ifconfig(8),   ndis_events(8),   ndiscvt(8),   ndisgen(8),
       wpa_supplicant(8)

       NDIS 5.1 specification, http://www.microsoft.com.

HISTORY

       The ndis device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.3.

AUTHORS

       The ndis driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>.

Debian                                           March 14, 2010                                          NDIS(4)