Port Miniport Drivers from NDIS 5.x to 6.0 (Compact 2013)
3/26/2014
The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) facilitates communication between the Windows Embedded Compact OS and network adapter and protocol drivers. This guide describes the steps for porting miniport drivers for Windows Embedded Compact from NDIS 5.x to NDIS 6.0.
NDIS 6.0 provides a translation layer to accommodate drivers that are based on the older NDIS 5.x specification, but this translation layer might decrease system performance, particularly in the send and receive code paths. For this reason, and for driver longevity, we recommend that you use native NDIS 6.0 drivers in Windows Embedded Compact. NDIS 6.0 offers improvements in the following areas to provide significant performance gains and to simplify driver development:
- Streamlined driver initialization
- NET_BUFFER data packaging for increased performance
- Improved send and receive paths
- Enhanced run-time reconfiguration abilities
- Receive scaling
- New scatter/gather DMA support
- Simplified reset handling
- NDIS interface information and versioned interfaces
For more about NDIS 6.0 and the advantages that it provides over NDIS 5.x, see Introduction to NDIS 6.0.
The process for porting an NDIS 5.x miniport driver to NDIS 6.0 in Windows Embedded Compact requires the following:
- You have an existing NDIS 5.x miniport driver for Windows Embedded Compact or Windows CE.
- You have created an OS design within Platform Builder. For more information about how to create an OS design, see Design an OS.
- Your target device has one Ethernet card for downloading the run-time image and one Ethernet card for miniport driver development.
- You are familiar with downloading run-time images to a target device. For more information, see Download the OS to the Device.
- You are familiar with the device driver architecture of Windows Embedded Compact.
Miniport driver porting in Windows Embedded Compact is similar to the process for developing device drivers in Windows Embedded Compact. For more information about Windows Embedded Compact device driver development, see the Device Driver Developer Guide.