NDIS 5.0 in Vista ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Polaris
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Polaris

Hi Experts:

I have a question on NDIS version usable under Windows Vista:

We have been using an NDIS miniport driver writing using NDIS 5.0. Will this
work under Windows Vista? If not, what should I do to make it work in Vista
with minimum change? For example, should I port the driver code to NDIS 5.1
(which is supported by Vista as I read from the web)?

If I port the code to NDIS 6.0, will the driver still work under older
Windows platforms like Windows 2000 and XP?

Thanks for your advises !
Polaris
 
We have been using an NDIS miniport driver writing using NDIS 5.0. Will this
work under Windows Vista?
Click to expand...

Sure it will....

The only thing that is not supported under Vista is NDIS IM filters -
NDIS5 IM MUX, miniport
ans protocol drivers are going to work, although at some performance
penalty, compared to their NDIS 6 counterparts (more on this below)...
If I port the code to NDIS 6.0, will the driver still work under older
Windows platforms like Windows 2000 and XP?
Click to expand...

Of course not - NDIS 6 is very different from earlier NDIS versions,
particularly when it comes to parameters that you pass to to NDIS
functions. This is why translation of NDIS5 calls to NDIS 6 may have
some negative impact on performance when you run NDIS5 driver under
Vista

Anton Bassov
 
NDIS 5 IM filter and MUX drivers -are- supported under Vista. Maybe you
meant to say NDIS -6- IM filter drivers are not supported which is true
(NDIS 6 filter drivers should use NDIS 6 lightweight filter driver model).

This said you should expect support for NDIS 5 IM filter drivers to be one
of the first to be dropped in the -yet to be determined- future version of
NDIS due to extreme complexities of supporting NDIS 5 IM filter drivers in
Vista in general and supporting a stack that consists of both NDIS 5 IM
filter drivers and NDIS 6 lightweight filter drivers in particular (still
having nightmares...).

You are correct that running NDIS 5 miniport drivers under Vista will incur
a performance penalty because TCPIP in Vista is NDIS 6 and NDIS would have
to translate every and each NDIS_PACKET to NET_BUFFER (and vice versa) on
xmit and receive path.

-ali
 
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