[ale] MintWifi

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 13:51 -0700, JK wrote:

> 
> IIRC NDIS is a generic driver; the .INF file tells the
> NDIS driver how to talk to a particular card. That
> is, there isn't a separate binary driver for each card;
> there's a single binary driver, which reads .INF files
> in order to understand the particulars of each card.


Oh, if only it were that simple; but that would make sense!

Microsoft, unfortunately, does not do things that way.  All of their
network drivers are binary.  The *.INF files give the operating system
metadata about the driver?what version of Windows it belongs to, a
pretty name for the device, etc.

NDIS is just an API for writing drivers for NICs.  That's why the files
can be loaded by a Linux kernel module, because they follow the API.
Honestly, I think that something like the Uniform Driver Interface would
be better, but I don't don't see Microsoft and Apple agreeing to such a
thing anytime soon.  Perhaps the free operating systems would be able to
unite their individual driver-bases with something like this...

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
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