Freebsd ndis driver - import windows driver to freebsd ....

Step 1: Install NDIS code

cd /sys/modules/ndis && make && make install

Step 2: Figure out what hardware you have to support

This can be annoying . . . vendors ship different components in their machines, along with driver disks with all the possible variants of drivers, so you have to find the right driver. Unless you're a big hardware weenie, you're not sure, and pulling the right driver from the vendor can be hard.

If yours is a PCI device, you can ask pciconf to list what is on the system, and collate it with a vendor/device information database:

pciconf -lv

And here I see:

none6@pci2:4:0: class=0x028000 card=0x00031028 chip=0x432014e4 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'Broadcom Corporation'
    device   = 'BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller'
    class    = network

Step 3: Go Get the Win2K/XP Driver

You have to pull this off the CDROM or a web site yourself. Bonus points when the driver is packaged in a self-extracting archive, then you have to borrow a Windows machine to get the .sys and .inf files. Joy!

In this case, Dell re-brands the Broadcom driver as a Dell driver, so I download the "Dell _Wireless (US) WLAN Network Adapter Card" from their web site, extract the files on my Windows box, and select the bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys …

Step 4: Copy those Drivers to /sys/modules/if_ndis

# ls *.inf *.sys
bcmwl5.inf      bcmwl5.sys      bcmwl5a.inf     bcmwlntp.sys
# cp bcmwl5.* /sys/modules/if_ndis
# ls /sys/modules/if_ndis
Makefile        bcmwl5.inf      bcmwl5.sys
# cd /sys/modules/if_ndis

Step 5: Magic

Take a deep breath, stretch your arms, think a happy though, and:

# ndiscvt -i bcmwl5.inf -s bcmwl5.sys -o ndis_driver_data.h
ndiscvt: line 13: e: syntax error.
ÿþ[#

Okay, don't panic! I have seen this before. The ndiscvt works on ASCII files, but many a crafty driver has been distributing stuff in Unicode. If I look at bcmwl5.inf, I see:

# hd bcmwl5.inf | head -3
00000000  ff fe 3b 00 3b 00 0d 00  0a 00 3b 00 3b 00 20 00  |..;.;.....;.;. .|
00000010  62 00 63 00 6d 00 77 00  6c 00 35 00 2e 00 69 00  |b.c.m.w.l.5...i.|
00000020  6e 00 66 00 0d 00 0a 00  3b 00 3b 00 0d 00 0a 00  |n.f.....;.;.....|

For your edification, if a file looks like null-padded ASCII characters, then it is probably UTF-16.

# iconv -c -f utf-16 -t ascii bcmwl5.inf > bcmwl5.inf.ascii
# head -3 bcmwl5.inf.ascii
;;
;; bcmwl5.inf
;;
# ndiscvt -i bcmwl5.inf.ascii  -s bcmwl5.sys -o ndis_driver_data.h

Well, that was easy.

Step 6: Compile, Install

Basically:

make && make install

Load the module:

kldload ndis
kldload if_ndis

And, see if you have an Ethernet device:

# ifconfig ndis0
ndis0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        ether ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect
        status: no carrier
        ssid ""
         channel -1 authmode OPEN powersavemode OFF powersavesleep 100
        rtsthreshold 2312 protmode CTS
        wepmode OFF weptxkey 1

(You shouldn't ever have that as a MAC address, unless you're blogging sensitive data to the Internet. ;)

Loading NDIS at Boot

Once you are happy with your NDIS, add a line like this to /boot/loader.conf, which will cause the kernel to load your new module at boot time:

if_ndis_load="YES"

At this point, you're ready to get back to your FreeBSD Handbook if you need further information.