NDISulator

[Pete Carah]

The NDISulator has some interesting problems on amd64 (Compaq v2310US);
the bios locks out any attempt to use a atheros minipci card (much preferable 
over HPs choice of Broadcom) so at the moment I'm stuck with using a cardbus 
card under fbsd.  I'd like to use the builtin.

There are two solutions obvious:
1. (best but hard) hack the bios to allow the atheros card to be used.  
  This turns out to be easy on Thinkpads but not on the HP/Compaq due to 
  a very different method of checking the vendor/id pairs.
2. (less preferable, especially if you need full WPA) Use the NDISulator 
  with the broadcom.  Problem here is that there are only two 64-bit 
  drivers around (that one can indirectly find off google) - one from an 
  unknown source that Linuxant has on their website (This one doesn't 
  recognize the 4318, and if you mod the .inf file to handle the 4318 
  (easy) the driver still won't initialize the chip (comes up with 
-----------------
found-> vendor=0x14e4, dev=0x4318, revid=0x02
        bus=5, slot=2, func=0
        class=02-80-00, hdrtype=0x00, mfdev=0
        cmdreg=0x0006, statreg=0x0000, cachelnsz=0 (dwords)
        lattimer=0x40 (1920 ns), mingnt=0x00 (0 ns), maxlat=0x00 (0 ns)
        intpin=a, irq=20
pci5:2:0: reprobing on driver added
ndis0: <Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN> mem 0xc0204000-0xc0205fff irq 20 at device 2.0 on pci5
ndis0: Reserved 0x2000 bytes for rid 0x10 type 3 at 0xc0204000
ioapic0: routing intpin 20 (PCI IRQ 20) to cluster 0
ndis0: [MPSAFE]
ndis0: NDIS API version: 5.1
ndis0: NDIS ERROR: c000138d (unknown error)
ndis0: init handler failed
device_attach: ndis0 attach returned 6
-------------------
  The other is one from Acer for the 4318 only.  This one crashes the 
  system (reboots almost instantly) when kldload'd, so I can't give anyone
  dmesg info from it.
  Both of these are named BCMWL564.SYS.
3. Try to talk Broadcom into splitting their driver like Atheros and
  Nvidia have, then allow open source OS-dependent parts (or, even better,
  just opening the driver like they did the wired ones.  Yes, I know the
  FCC excuse...)  Good Luck...

Obviously #2 and 3 are pertinent to this list.  It would be nice to
figure out why Acer's BCM driver crashes under NDISulator and not 
NDISwrapper  (several people report this working under Gentoo and Fedora
but several others report it not working in some other systems, but noone
reports a crash.).  I do know that ndiswrapper doesn't preprocess the .sys
file, but just loads it at run time then acts as a shim.

And, HP's BCMWL5.SYS driver didn't work under NDISulator in 32-bit mode 
either, with a timeout of some kind during the device probe.

-- Pete