Initializing a Miniport Driver with a WDM Lower Edge

After a miniport driver has been loaded by the operating system, NDIS calls the miniport driver's MiniportInitializeEx function to initialize a miniport instance that the miniport driver manages. To communicate through a miniport instance that has a WDM lower edge, the miniport driver must retrieve specific information to set up its communications.

During initialization of this miniport instance, the miniport driver must call the NdisMGetDeviceProperty function to retrieve device objects that are required to set up communication with the miniport instance through a WDM interface. In this call, the miniport driver passes the handle to the miniport instance in the MiniportAdapterHandle parameter and buffers that receive pointers to DEVICE_OBJECT structures. The miniport driver uses the retrieved pointer to the next-device object ( NextDeviceObject parameter) to create and submit IRPs. For more information, see Handling IRPs.

A miniport driver with a WDM lower edge must be a deserialized miniport driver. A deserialized miniport driver manages its own queue of send and receive requests internally whenever it has insufficient resources to handle these requests immediately; if a miniport driver is not deserialized, NDIS manages this queue. An NDIS-WDM miniport driver must be deserialized because it sends and receives packets outside of the context of NDIS calls. During initialization of a miniport instance, an NDIS-WDM miniport driver must specify the deserialized feature. All NDIS 6.0 and later miniport drivers are deserialized.

Note that an NDIS-WDM miniport driver cannot be an intermediate driver (a driver that exposes a miniport driver interface at the top and a protocol driver interface at the bottom).