NDIS Management Information and OIDs (NDIS 5.1)
Note NDIS 5. x has been deprecated and is superseded by NDIS 6. x. For new NDIS driver development, see Network Drivers Starting with Windows Vista. For information about porting NDIS 5. x drivers to NDIS 6. x, see Porting NDIS 5.x Drivers to NDIS 6.0.
Each miniport driver contains its own MIB, which is an information block in which the driver stores dynamic configuration information and statistical information that a management entity can query or set. An Ethernet multicast address list is an example of configuration information. The number of broadcast packets received is an example of statistical information. Each information element within the MIB is referred to as an object. To refer to each such managed object, NDIS defines an Object Identifier. Therefore, if a management entity wants to query or set a particular managed object, it must provide the specific OID for that object.
The MIB tracks three classes of objects:
Those general to all NDIS miniport drivers
Those specific to all NDIS miniport drivers for a given medium type, such as Ethernet or Token Ring
Those specific to a particular vendor implementation
The general and mandatory media-specific OIDs are documented in the Network Driver Reference. The implementation-specific OIDs for a particular NIC driver should be listed and described in the documentation accompanying a given NIC driver.
Besides being classified as either operational characteristics (for example, multicast address list) or statistics (for example, broadcast packets received), objects are classified as either mandatory or optional. All operational characteristics objects for either general or media-specific classes are mandatory, but only some statistics objects are mandatory. All implementation-specific objects are classified as mandatory.
For more information about OID classifications, see NDIS Object Identifiers.