WDF for network adapters

The clumsy interop between NDIS and WDF has been a recurring theme on this list. That’s about to change: at last week’s WinHEC, we announced that you can now write a NIC driver using pure WDF. You don’t need to use NDIS or its NBLs anymore. (Don’t worry - NDIS isn’t going away, so your existing drivers still work.)

Here’s all the details: https://aka.ms/netadapter . If you’re too busy to click a link, the two main punchlines are: (1) Windows now includes a WDF class extension for networking; and (2) we’re rolling out a new datapath designed to make networking great again.

Ask your questions here or send mail to . This is a preview of our APIs, and we’re keen on getting your feedback. In fact, various aspects of the new APIs were motivated by past NDIS + WDF threads on OSR’s NTDEV list, so we’ve already incorporated some feedback from y’all.

Cheers from Seattle,
- The NDIS & WDF teams at Microsoft.

Hi

Has WMBclass.sys been ported to NetAdapterCx ?

Thanks

> Has WMBclass.sys been ported to NetAdapterCx ?

It will be. We’ve been internally discussing exactly when we do it. The team that owns wmbclass needs to scale it up to multi-gigabit throughput (what marketing calls “5G”), and NetAdapter’s datapath will help them get there with less fuss than with NBLs.

Thanks, will this be staged like below or direct port (2) ?

  1. Port WMBLASS data-path to NBL
  2. Port WMBCLASS directly to WDF (i.e. NRB)

We are still working out the plan.

Sorry for the dissatisfying response. We’re trying to be more open with NetAdapter than in previous iterations of NDIS, which means that I’ll have to say “I don’t know yet” more than we have in the past. NetAdapter is new enough that the WWAN team hasn’t had a chance to digest it yet.