Aliberti Emanuele wrote:
Filip Navara wrote:
I have read the WHDC papers about NDIS 6 and in fact the major changes are
- Minor extensions to miniport interface (as in every NDIS version
before). This includes some added *Ex functions and now NdisMRegisterMiniportDriver function that overcomes NdisMInitializeWrapper+NdisMRegisterMiniport combo.
- Native support for IEEE 802.11a/b.
- Net buffers (a technology to manage packet pools used by miniports
and IM drivers).
I forgot to metion: - Lightwight filters - a replacement for NDIS IM drivers (this might be backported to NDIS 5.1, but I haven't heard any official info about it.) - New Scatter/Gather DMA API (not that interesting, but worth mentioning)
They say using NDIS 5 drivers will be possible, but at the cost of minor performance.
I'm a bit sceptic about the MS performance claims. A well-written optimized NDIS 5 driver would propably perform just as good as a similar NDIS 6 miniport driver. It's just easier to use the net buffers than doing all the stuff in miniports.
Does it mean those net buffers can not be used by NDIS 5 drivers?
The net buffers API are currently available only on NDIS 6 and most propably will not be backported.
Regards, Filip