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MiniportAddDevice Guidelines for PF Miniport Drivers

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This topic describes the guidelines for writing a MiniportAddDevice function for the miniport driver of the PCI Express (PCIe) Physical Function (PF). The PF is a component of a network adapter that supports single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV).

Note  These guidelines only apply to PF miniport drivers. For initialization guidelines for the miniport driver of a PCIe Virtual Function (VF) of the adapter, see Initializing a VF Miniport Driver.

The Plug and Play (PnP) Manager calls the NDIS AddDevice function to create the functional device object (FDO) for the network adapter. If the PF miniport driver registered a MiniportAddDevice entry point when it called NdisMRegisterMiniportDriver, NDIS calls the driver's MiniportAddDevice function.

When MiniportAddDevice is called, the PF miniport driver can allocate additional software resources for the SR-IOV and the network interface card (NIC) switch. Typically, these are resources that must be allocated before NDIS calls the driver's MiniportInitializeEx function.

The driver can do the following within the context of the call to MiniportAddDevice:

  • The PF miniport driver can call NdisReadConfiguration to read the SR-IOV and NIC switch configuration settings from the registry. These configuration settings are defined through the standardized SR-IOV keywords. For more information about these keywords, see Standardized INF Keywords for SR-IOV.

  • Based on these configuration settings, the PF miniport driver allocates the additional software resources for the SR-IOV network adapter.

Note  The actual allocation of hardware resources and the enabling of SR-IOV in the PCI configuration space must only be done within the context of the call to MiniportInitializeEx. Because the network adapter's memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) space is uninitialized when MiniportAddDevice is called, the miniport driver must not read or write to the adapter until MiniportInitializeEx is called.