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Locating the Transport Header for Encapsulated Packets in the Receive Path

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On receiving a packet, a NIC that supports Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) must first determine whether the packet is encapsulated and, if so, the type of encapsulation.

Note  In the send path, a packet is encapsulated if NDIS_TCP_SEND_OFFLOADS_SUPPLEMENTAL_NET_BUFFER_LIST_INFO.IsEncapsulatedPacket is TRUE.

In the receive path, the NIC must determine whether the packet is encapsulated by checking the protocol number in the Protocol field of the IPv4 tunnel (outer) header or the NextHeader field of the IPv6 tunnel (outer) header. The list of assigned protocol numbers can be found at https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-numbers.xml.

Once a packet is determined to be an encapsulated packet, the NIC must determine the offset to the transport (inner) IP header by parsing the encapsulated packet's protocol.

For NDIS 6.30 (Windows Server 2012) and later, only GRE IP encapsulation is supported. So the NIC should be able to parse the following, depending on the advertised capabilities:

If the NIC finds an unknown or unsupported encapsulation protocol, it must pass the packet unchanged to the host stack.

Thus, on the receive path, the miniport must parse the transport (inner) IP header to determine the IP version as well as to get to the TCP or UDP header. This is a new requirement for NDIS 6.30 (Windows Server 2012) and later.