On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:20:13AM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> A group has announced a (closed source) mechanism to allow Windows
> network drivers to run on Linux.
> 
> Looking at the NDIS spec (the spec for the API that Windows network
> drivers use), I note that, unlike most parts of Windows, the driver
> APIs are actually very well defined. I bet it would be straightforward
> to make Windows network drivers run under NetBSD (and possibly other
> sorts of Windows drivers as well.)
> 
> I thought I'd throw the idea out to see if anyone gets inspired to try
> doing it. :)

The last system I used which tried to do this discovered that many of
the windows drivers are actually buggy (as well as terribly inefficient).

In particular some of them transmit frame padding from random pointers!
Usually off the end of the last data fragment, but sometimes the
control structure!!  This caused particular grief when the last buffer
fragment was at the end of a kernel page.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk