Registering Miniport Driver Functions for WDM Lower Edge (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 x has been deprecated and is superseded by NDIS 6.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.
A miniport driver that has a WDM lower edge must call the NdisMRegisterMiniportfunction in its DriverEntryroutine to register certain entry-point functions with the NDIS library. These entry-point functions compose the miniport driver's upper edge and are described in Registering MiniportXxx Functions. However, a miniport driver that has a WDM lower edge is not required to set up certain entry-point functions. For example, the following entry-point functions are not set up for the following reasons:
MiniportISR, MiniportHandleInterrupt, MiniportEnableInterrupt, MiniportDisableInterrupt
Because the miniport driver does not receive interrupts from a physical NIC, it does not require these entry-point routines. The driver for the particular bus receives interrupts when packets arrive on the bus that are intended for the miniport driver. The bus driver then notifies the miniport driver.
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The miniport driver passes entire packets when it indicates those packets. Higher-level drivers will never initiate calls to this entry-point routine to transfer the remaining contents of packets, so it is not specified.
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Since the miniport driver does not allocate shared memory, a completion entry-point routine is not specified.
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The miniport driver can rely on NDIS to determine if its miniport instance is hung, based on sends and requests that time out, so this routine is not typically required.
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The miniport driver does not set up a shut-down routine because the miniport instance has no hardware that must be shut down.