Windows network drivers linux

Use drivers from windows to linux

I have this wifi card: WG311v3 — G54 Wireless PCI Adapter; that only work in Windows with specific driver. How can i use it too with GNU/Linux ? I read about the wine program but here they said that we can’t install drivers in wine. Is there an other solution ?

Does the wifi card «just work» in Linux now? Tried searching for the exact card (or however it’s identified in Linux) plus «linux»?

What make and model wifi card? I note that WIFI cards are relatively cheap, and it may pay — even in a notebook — to simply replace the card.

Do an lspci -n under Linux. This will give you the vendor and product id which you can use (in the form 0123:4567 ) to find out if the card is supported under Linux.

Yep, was easy to find instructions for using ndiswrapper with this card, though finding the download for the driver binaries was a little tricky.

1 Answer 1

The tool for getting Windows network drivers to work in Linux is called NdisWrapper (wiki, downloads). NDIS (Network Device Interface Specification) is the Windows network driver API; NdisWrapper is a Linux kernel module that basically presents a fake Windows kernel to a Windows network driver and translates between that and normal the Linux network driver interface.

NdisWrapper isn’t perfect — it doesn’t support all drivers and it may crash your Linux system — and free software advocates don’t like it because it’s basically loading proprietary code (the Windows driver) into a F/LOSS OS kernel. With that said, though, it often can be made to work. You may have better luck using drivers targeted at older Windows versions, since the NDIS spec changes somewhat over time; if you can’t find an XP driver for the card, look for a Vista/Win7 one, then Win8/8.1 if you can’t find that.

It’s a little more complicated to install and configure than is typical for either native Linux drivers or drivers on Windows, but if you want to run Linux on not-fully-compatible hardware it may just let you do that thing.

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Hyper-V network driver¶

This driver is compatible with Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016 and Windows 10.

Features¶

Checksum offload¶

The netvsc driver supports checksum offload as long as the Hyper-V host version does. Windows Server 2016 and Azure support checksum offload for TCP and UDP for both IPv4 and IPv6. Windows Server 2012 only supports checksum offload for TCP.

Receive Side Scaling¶

Hyper-V supports receive side scaling. For TCP & UDP, packets can be distributed among available queues based on IP address and port number.

For TCP & UDP, we can switch hash level between L3 and L4 by ethtool command. TCP/UDP over IPv4 and v6 can be set differently. The default hash level is L4. We currently only allow switching TX hash level from within the guests.

On Azure, fragmented UDP packets have high loss rate with L4 hashing. Using L3 hashing is recommended in this case.

For example, for UDP over IPv4 on eth0:

To include UDP port numbers in hashing:

ethtool -N eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4 sdfn

To exclude UDP port numbers in hashing:

ethtool -N eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4 sd

ethtool -n eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4

Generic Receive Offload, aka GRO¶

The driver supports GRO and it is enabled by default. GRO coalesces like packets and significantly reduces CPU usage under heavy Rx load.

Large Receive Offload (LRO), or Receive Side Coalescing (RSC)¶

The driver supports LRO/RSC in the vSwitch feature. It reduces the per packet processing overhead by coalescing multiple TCP segments when possible. The feature is enabled by default on VMs running on Windows Server 2019 and later. It may be changed by ethtool command:

ethtool -K eth0 lro on ethtool -K eth0 lro off

SR-IOV support¶

Hyper-V supports SR-IOV as a hardware acceleration option. If SR-IOV is enabled in both the vSwitch and the guest configuration, then the Virtual Function (VF) device is passed to the guest as a PCI device. In this case, both a synthetic (netvsc) and VF device are visible in the guest OS and both NIC’s have the same MAC address.

The VF is enslaved by netvsc device. The netvsc driver will transparently switch the data path to the VF when it is available and up. Network state (addresses, firewall, etc) should be applied only to the netvsc device; the slave device should not be accessed directly in most cases. The exceptions are if some special queue discipline or flow direction is desired, these should be applied directly to the VF slave device.

Receive Buffer¶

Packets are received into a receive area which is created when device is probed. The receive area is broken into MTU sized chunks and each may contain one or more packets. The number of receive sections may be changed via ethtool Rx ring parameters.

There is a similar send buffer which is used to aggregate packets for sending. The send area is broken into chunks, typically of 6144 bytes, each of section may contain one or more packets. Small packets are usually transmitted via copy to the send buffer. However, if the buffer is temporarily exhausted, or the packet to be transmitted is an LSO packet, the driver will provide the host with pointers to the data from the SKB. This attempts to achieve a balance between the overhead of data copy and the impact of remapping VM memory to be accessible by the host.

XDP support¶

XDP (eXpress Data Path) is a feature that runs eBPF bytecode at the early stage when packets arrive at a NIC card. The goal is to increase performance for packet processing, reducing the overhead of SKB allocation and other upper network layers.

hv_netvsc supports XDP in native mode, and transparently sets the XDP program on the associated VF NIC as well.

Setting / unsetting XDP program on synthetic NIC (netvsc) propagates to VF NIC automatically. Setting / unsetting XDP program on VF NIC directly is not recommended, also not propagated to synthetic NIC, and may be overwritten by setting of synthetic NIC.

XDP program cannot run with LRO (RSC) enabled, so you need to disable LRO before running XDP:

XDP_REDIRECT action is not yet supported.

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How to install (and validate) windows network drivers in linux (mint)

I’ve had issues with linux drivers for my wifi network card, I’m now attempting to install the windows network drivers. I’ve installed the windows drivers via the Windows Network Drivers gui. Now I’m trying to verify if that driver is in use:

> sudo lspci -v # cut irrelevant parts # 05:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 20) Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Killer N1525 Wireless-AC Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31 Memory at f6800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable+ Count=8/8 Maskable+ 64bit- Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [148] Virtual Channel Capabilities: [168] Device Serial Number 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00 Capabilities: [178] Latency Tolerance Reporting Capabilities: [180] L1 PM Substates Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci Kernel modules: ath10k_pci 

Kernel driver in use seems to be the original linux driver there right? I’m absolutely no expert here (aside from the last few weeks of tinkering). What do I need to do enable the new windows driver? From a youtube tutorial I tried the following (without the slightest idea why I was doing it):

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper sudo ndiswrapper -m sudo ndiswrapper -mi 

sudo service network-manager restart 

If I attempt to blacklist the existing wifi drivers by adding blacklist ath10k-pci to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist then run modprobe -r ath10k-pci , modprobe ath10k-pci , I see this in dmesg and it seems to load the current drivers anyway. I’m certainly doing something wrong, but not sure what.

[ 1519.468092] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/cal-pci-0000:05:00.0.bin failed with error -2 [ 1520.701796] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: qca6174 hw2.1 (0x05010000, 0x003405ff sub 1a56:1525) fw SW_RM.1.1.1-00157-QCARMSWPZ-1 fwapi 5 bdapi 2 htt-ver 3.1 wmi-op 4 htt-op 3 cal otp max-sta 32 raw 0 hwcrypto 1 features ignore-otp,no-4addr-pad 

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NDISwrapper: Install Windows Drivers on Linux

There are more and more drivers or hardware controllers for GNU / Linux distributions, but there may still be some components that lack specific drivers and do not work on our computer. There is a tool that is not current, but has taken a long time but perhaps it is not known so much, which is called ndiswrapper and is used to install Windows drivers in Linux.

Although it seems strange to you if you did not know her, it is possible to do this. Basically ndiswrapper transforms the drivers built to be installed in Windows into a driver ready to be functional in Linux, although this is not recommended and it can give problems, for certain extreme cases it can be very practical and avoid more than one problem with the compatibility of our components.

Specifically, what ndiswrapper allows is to use network card drivers that have been created for Windows and under its API, to encapsulate them in such a way that it can work with the Linux kernel. You can install it on your distro from the repositories, downloading it from the web or with tools like aptitude, from the sources, etc. Once installed we can take network card drivers for Microsoft Windows and look for the .inf file that is included in these.

Then with the .inf file In our distro, we execute the following command, which will create by default a file /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper with the alias that will relate to the drivers. This could cause problems if we already have another card with the same name, so it would have to be modified. Once done the following should work:

ndiswrapper -i nombre_driver.inf ndiswrapper -m modprobe ndiswrapper

We can see the drivers installed with:

Or delete the controller if it does not work or is not correct:

ndiswrapper -r nombre_driver

Just as there is ndiswrapper for network card drivers, there are also other tools for other types of hardware that perform the same function, using closed Windows drivers to be installed in our Linux distro. Another example would be Envyng, in this case for NVIDIA and ATI / AMD GPUs, although this is currently stupid considering that there are both free and private drivers for Linux for these cards .

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tigreci said

and there is no generic one? That is to say that it works for any type of driver regardless of whether it is a gpu, an ethernet, a wifi or whatever?

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