Does there exists: Generic Ethernet Adapter driver

[bobcpg]

Is there a generic ethernet driver that will work with most/all wired ethernet adapters.

I thought I heard somewhere that 3com or some other big company made such a thing?


thanks,
bob

 

[n0cmonkey]

3com might have one for 3com products, and I think Intel has some kind of unified driver installation. But different network cards are too different to have a unified driver for everything.

 

[JackMDS]

May be this can Help: http://www.users.on.net/~driver/bootdisk/cards.htm

You would notice that to be close to Generic there js 82 drivers on this Generic Boot Disk.

:sun:

 

[Nothinman]

Is there a generic ethernet driver that will work with most/all wired ethernet adapters.

No such thing. There are many different chipsets available and the driver would have to know how to work with all of them which just isn't possible to maintain. At one point there was a NE-compatible almost standard, but that seems to have died and you'll only find those in an ISA flavor. For instance in Linux there's 8 drivers just for 3Com cards, 3 for Intel, 8 for Sun, etc.

 

[Mir96TA]

Nec200o Back When I was doing
Win3.X

 

[Garion]

That's kind of like saying "Is there one tire that fits all cars?" Same answer, too. Nope. Keep in mind that a driver is an interface between the OS and the specific hardware on the card. The driver has to be designed to support the hardware of one (or one family of) cards.

Theoretically, you COULD write one, but you'd have to add in functionality for all the hardware used to build all the NIC's and the thing would be so bloated it'd probably run out of memory on the machine when you loaded it.

- G