Network Drivers

NDIS 4.0 support has been added. New NDIS features of interest to developers of miniport and protocol drivers include support for the following:

• Full-duplex operation on SMP machines

• Multipacket sends and multipacket receive indications

• Specifying out-of-band information, such as packet priorities and timestamps, with packet descriptors

• Transferring ownership of received packets instead of copying

• Asynchronous memory allocation at raised IRQL

• Support for NDIS intermediate drivers

• New system functions

While NDIS Version 4.0 continues to support drivers written to the NDIS Version 3.0 standard, NDIS Version 4.0 drivers can be installed only on Windows NT Version 4.0 platforms or, for binary-compatible NIC miniport drivers, on platforms running the corresponding update version of Windows® 95.