NDIS 6.0 Design Objectives
Two major objectives have guided the design and development of NDIS 6.0:
Enhancing driver performance and scalability. (See Enhanced Performance and Scalability for more information.)
Major improvements in the following provide significant performance gains for both clients and servers:
- Network data packaging
- Send and receive paths
- Run-time reconfiguration capabilities
- Scatter/gather DMA
- Filter drivers
- Multiprocessor scaling of received data handling
- Offloading TCP tasks to NICs
Simplifying the NDIS driver model. (See Simplified Driver Model for more information.)
The following improvements simplify driver development:
- Streamlined driver initialization
- Versioning support for NDIS interfaces
- Simplified reset handling
- A standard interface for obtaining management information
- A filter driver model to replace filter intermediate drivers