What is windows miniport network adapter replacement in linux?

What is windows miniport network adapter replacement in linux?

"Miniport network adapter" does not explain much – miniport driver is something rather specific to the Windows driver model, and describes how the driver was written, but not what it does.

Some entity (module?) that will behave as a pass-through for ethernet packets, and which can be programmatically activated and deactivated, and which can be programmatically used to setup IP networking through it

If your goal is to create a network interface that is controlled by software (i.e. packets sent through the interface are received by a program through a filehandle, and vice versa), then you should use a tap or tun interface. (The former carries packets with a layer-2 Ethernet header, the latter without, but otherwise they're the same.)

• Official documentation:

  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt

  (This documentation is quite old; in all modern Linux distributions you do not need to create device nodes by hand, nor load kernel modules manually. However, section 3 "Program interface" and the ioctl-based API is still accurate.)

TUN/TAP interfaces are used by most VPN and VM software on Linux; indeed the "TAP-Windows" and "Wintun" NDIS drivers that are available on Windows were written to imitate them.

It is also possible to write your own network interface driver which does the same (such as 'vboxnetadp' used by VirtualBox and 'sheep_net' used by the SheepShaver Mac emulator), but most sysadmins will thank you for not doing so and for using the standard tun/tap instead.