Windows XP support for Remote NDIS

Question

I'm looking at developing a device which will need to support Ethernet over USB (hosted in Linux, XP, and Vista). As I understand it, Vista and Linux support the industry standard USB CDC. However, in classic Windows style, XP only supports it's own Remote NDIS. So, now I'm thinking of just bowing down and doing it over RNDIS, as opposed to rolling my own CDC driver for XP.

I've been reading some older documentation that says even XP is pretty buggy with NDIS (suprise!). Does anyone have experience with XP's RNDIS drivers? Are they safe for product development? Any insight would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

After doing my own research and testing, a single NDIS device works reasonably well. However, if you are at all needing to support multiple NDIS devices, you are out of luck. My system became extremely unstable and was essentially unusable. This was very reproducible.

I would not recommend NDIS in any type of multiple-device scenario.

Answer 2

We use RNDIS at work. and I've found that it blue screens my machine every now and again (about every month or two). However others (at my work) have not had this happen, so it could just be the particular device that I use.

I think it is stable enough for development, so give it a go.

Answer 3

The problem here is that Linux does not support RNDIS in the host mode, and you can't develop custom driver due to MS RNDIS license restrictions. MAC does not support RNDIS as well due to same reason (licensing).

So if you need multiplatform solution you need a standard approach which is CDC/ECM.
There is number of available CDC/ECM XP/VIsta solutions in the market,you can google for them i don't want to advertise our solution here :)

Answer 4

if you are looking for commercial solution, Jungo does provide decent ECM solutions works for Windows/Linux/Mac. The only problem is that you have to pay them non-trivial royalty fee if you are going for a mass volume product.