NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Windows XP network device drivers (for devices such as PCI cards, USB modems, and routers) on Linux operating systems.

As a result, it only works on systems based on the instruction set architectures supported by Windows, namely IA-32 and x86-64.

To achieve this "compilation" NDISwrapper requires at least the ".inf" and the ".sys" files invariably supplied as parts of the Windows driver.

NDISwrapper enables a Unix-like system to use Windows drivers of type NDIS and WIFI.

So the "mini ntoskrnl" must know there are other drivers, it must have registered them in its internal database a priori by reading the Windows ".inf" files.