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Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] hope to support NPcap by improving WinPcap's DLL searching logic

From: Yang Luo <hsluoyb@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2015 01:24:45 +0800
Hi list,

I'm developing NPcap, an alternative to original WinPcap but with more features like NDIS 6 support and others. NPcap is supposed to support Nmap, Wireshark and so on just like WinPcap did and follow the same DLL interface with WinPcap. NPcap can coexist with WinPcap, so we decide to install NPcap's DLLs (also wpcap.dll and packet.dll) to another directory than system32 (which is used by WinPcap) and let PATH environment variable point to it. However, after I did some research I found that Wireshark seems to search wpcap.dll only in 1) its installation folder; 2) system32. As it is, NPcap's DLLs can't be found by Wireshark. I wonder if Wireshark could just use LoadLibrary() to load wpcap.dll without specifying its path? So that Windows DLL loader could automatically target NPcap's wpcap.dll by searching PATH when WinPcap is unavailable. And then the end user will have another choice besides WinPcap when using Wireshark. Thanks!

NPcap is currently hosted at github as belows for your information:


Regards,
Yang