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Miniport Driver

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Applies To: Windows Server 2008

Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) supports miniport drivers for both connection-oriented environments and connectionless environments.

Connection-oriented miniport drivers control network adapters for connection-oriented network media, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). Connection-oriented miniport drivers are always deserialized — they always serialize the operation of their own MiniportXxx functions and queue internally all incoming send packets.

Connectionless miniport drivers control network adapters for connectionless network media, such as Ethernet, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), and Token Ring.

Connectionless miniport drivers can be serialized or deserialized:

  • Serialized drivers rely on NDIS to serialize calls to their MiniportXxx functions and to manage their send queues.
  • Deserialized drivers serialize the operation of their own MiniportXxx functions and internally queue all incoming send packets. 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 execute) are kept small.

Managed Entities

The following is a list of the managed entities that are included in this managed entity:

Name Description

Network Adapter

A network adapter is the network hardware that is responsible for sending and receiving data to the wire. The network adapter might not function correctly if the network adapter hardware that the driver is looking for has been removed from the computer, or if it is incorrectly configured or obsolete.

Aspects

The following is a list of all aspects that are part of this managed entity:

Name Description

Miniport Driver Configuration

The configuration of a miniport driver can be found in the registry, driver, and hardware settings that control the network adapter.

Miniport Driver Not Supported

Obsolete drivers are not supported in the versions of the Windows operating systems released after Windows XP.

Miniport Driver TCP Receive Window Size Configuration

The TCP receive window size is the amount of data that a receiver allows a sender to send before having to wait for an acknowledgement.

 

Miniport Driver Timeout Reporting

Driver timeout warnings can occur when the driver is waiting for an event. The driver might be able to handle this failure.

Networking