NDIS Support for Power Management (Windows Embedded CE 6.0)

1/6/2010

A Windows Embedded CE–based miniport driver requires some additional code for power management considerations. These considerations are based on whether the network card is a PC Card Network Adapters or a Built-in Network Adapters.

An NDIS miniport driver is required to set the NIC to the desired power state as a result of changes to the Power Management architecture. The driver cannot depend on a bus or ACPI driver to complete this task. If the NIC hardware loses bus configuration information the miniport driver must restore this information as well.

A miniport driver that does not implement the ResetHandler function should pass a large number for the CheckForHangInSeconds parameter in a call to NdisMSetAttributesEx. This prevents unnecessary wakeup periods in order to check for a hang in the system affecting power consumption. Alternatively, the registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\<Adapter Name>\Parms\CheckForHangTimeInSeconds can also be used. This registry entry overrides the default value as well as the value passed by NdisMSetAttributesEx.

See Also

Concepts

Network Driver Programming Considerations
Power Manager Requests and NDIS
NDIS Wake-on-LAN Support
PCMCIA-based Miniport Functional Interrupts
Power-Manageable NDIS Miniports