3.3  Registry Contents After Binding Analysis

As already mentioned in the preceding section, the binding engine writes the results for each component of the previously described steps into the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
\NameOfComponent\Linkage key. The following three value entries are written to this key.

Bind

Specifies a list of the device name(s) of the component(s) to which the binding engine has determined NameOfComponent can bind.

For a NIC driver, this list contains the name of one or more underlying network adapters it can manage.

For an intermediate driver, this list includes the NICs exported by all the NIC drivers for all network adapters on the machine. Because the binding engine includes the names of all NICs exported by any network driver, this list will include the name exported by the NDIS intermediate driver’s upper-edge miniport component. See Section 3.5 for a discussion of the review process in which this binding is deleted from the registry.

For a transport protocol driver, this is a list of the name(s) of all exported underlying NICs or virtual NICs to which it could possibly bind. This list can include devices that are incompatible with the transport’s operation, usually because the NIC implements a medium the transport does not support. See Section 3.5 for a discussion of the review process and the deletion of such devices from the Bind list. See also Section 3.4.8 for information about defining experimental media types.

For a service, this list includes the name(s) of one or more device(s) exported by transport protocol(s) to which the service can bind itself.

Export

Specifies a list of the device name(s) that an overlying component can use to bind itself to NameOfComponent.

Usually these device names are formed by concatenating the name of the exporting component with the Export entries of underlying components with which the exporting component can bind. However, a component can export a single, unconcatenated pseudo-device name to which still higher level components bind, but operate by multiplexing over several underlying devices. See Section 3.4.4 for more information about the BindForm net rule.

Route

Specifies the path through the network stack from NameOfComponent to the underlying NIC, as a concatenated list of exported device names configured beneath NameOfComponent.