PC Card Drivers
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8/28/2008
The PC Card host stack in Windows CE 5.0 includes support for 16-bit and 32-bit PC Cards. The PCMCIA driver in earlier versions of Windows Embedded CE provides support only for 16-bit drivers. Although this driver has been deprecated, legacy PCMCIA drivers will continue to function correctly due to a legacy compatibility layer built into the Windows CE 5.0 driver stack. For more information, see PCMCIA Legacy Compatibility Layer Architecture.
Note
A legacy PCMCIA client driver is one that was created prior to Windows CE 5.0 that supports only 16-bit PCMCIA cards. A PC Card driver is one that was created in Windows CE 5.0 that supports both 16 and 32-bit PCMCIA cards and was written using the bus-agnostic driver model. For more information, see PC Card Bus-Agnostic Client Drivers.
Note
The PC Card driver might not support dual serial port PC Cards. If the dual serial port PC Card is not supported you might observe that only one serial port is enumerated. This issue occurs because the logical implementation of exposing serial interfaces has changed. For older cards, each serial interface is implemented by a function, but the newer cards expose two serial interfaces by assigning a different memory window to each serial interface. The PC Card driver instantiates serial clients based on the function, not on the memory window.
Microsoft recommends that you convert legacy PCMCIA drivers to bus-agnostic drivers to take advantages of the improvements over the previous driver:
- Works on any bus driver designed to support the bus-agnostic model
- Sockets are isolated from one another
- Suspend, resume, and remove requests are handled more effectively
- Only one driver must be maintained in order to support PCI, PC Card, and local bus implementations of the same hardware
- The new driver is more stable than the legacy PCMCIA driver and helps protect against system crashes
In This Section
- PC Card Development Concepts
Explains the basic development concepts for PC Card drivers and describes the PC Card architecture.
- PC Card Driver Samples
Provides the location for PC Card driver samples.
- PC Card Driver Reference
Provides reference information for PC Card drivers.
Related Sections
- Power Management
Describes the power management capabilities provided by the Windows Embedded CE OS.