Through its non-NDIS lower edge, a miniport driver uses the class interface for a bus, such as the Universal Serial Bus (USB) to control a device on the bus. Connection-oriented miniport drivers are always deserialized - they always serialize the operation of their own MiniportXxx functions and queue internally all incoming send packets.Īn NDIS miniport driver can have a non-NDIS lower edge (see the following figure). Serialized drivers rely on NDIS to serialize calls to their MiniportXxx functions and to manage their send queues.Ĭonnection-oriented miniport drivers control NICs for connection-oriented network media, such as ISDN.

This results in significantly better full-duplex performance, provided that the driver's critical sections (code that only a single thread at a time can run) are kept small. Note All NDIS 6.0 and later drivers are deserialized.ĭeserialized drivers serialize the operation of their own MiniportXxx functions and that internally queue all incoming send packets. Connectionless miniport drivers are further divided into deserialized and serialized drivers: NDIS supports miniport drivers for both connectionless environments and connection-oriented environments.Ĭonnectionless miniport drivers control NICs for connectionless network media, such as Ethernet. The miniport driver sets up the transfer of data from the NIC and then indicates the presence of the received packet to bound higher-level drivers by calling the appropriate Ndis Xxx function.Ĭonnectionless and Connection-Oriented Miniport Drivers NDIS notifies the NIC's miniport driver by calling the appropriate MiniportXxx function. When a NIC receives a packet addressed to itself, it can post a hardware interrupt that is handled by NDIS or the NIC's miniport driver. The miniport driver then forwards the packet to the NIC for transmission by calling the appropriate Ndis Xxx functions. NDIS then passes the packet to the miniport driver by calling the appropriate MiniportXxx function exported by the miniport driver. When a transport driver has a packet to transmit, it calls an Ndis Xxx function exported by the NDIS library.

The following send and receive operations illustrate the interaction of miniport drivers with NDIS and with higher-level drivers: For more information about the NDIS driver stack and a diagram showing the relationship between all four NDIS driver types, see NDIS Driver Stack.

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