Miniport Drivers (Windows Embedded CE 6.0)

  • Article

1/6/2010

Miniport drivers directly manage network adapters that are installed on a device. At the lower edge, miniport drivers use NDIS to communicate with the adapter hardware. At the upper edge, miniport drivers present an interface to allow protocol drivers to configure the adapter and to send and receive packets over the network.

A miniport driver maintains information about its capabilities and status, as well as information about each NIC that it controls. An object identifier (OID) identifies each information type. NDIS Objects are system-defined.

NDIS and higher-level drivers can query and, in some cases, set information using OIDs. Higher-level drivers call NdisRequest to query or set information. To perform a query operation, NDIS calls the miniport's MiniportQueryInformation function. To perform a set operation, NDIS calls the miniport's MiniportSetInformation function.

Windows Embedded CE currently supports miniport drivers for the following medium types:

  • Ethernet (802.3)
  • Token Ring (802.5)
  • IrDA
  • WAN and WWAN

See Also

Reference

MiniportQueryInformation
MiniportSetInformation
NdisRequest

Concepts

Miniports, Intermediate Drivers, and Protocol Drivers
NDIS Objects
Virtual Ethernet Miniport(VEM)