Vimal,
I feel your pain. Unfortunately, like any other special drivers
(Graphics, storage etc), there is no book comprehensively describing how
to write such a driver. You can take a class to help you get started
with understanding the subject. The alternatives are the DDK docs and
samples. There is an excellent forum (hosted by Thomas F. Divine - DDK
MVP) focuses on NDIS (IM and protocols). Stephan Wolf (DDK MVP) who is
quite active on microsoft.public.development.device.drivers answering
NIDS miniport questions.
If your goal is to get into the field, (instead of developing a
production ndis driver immediately), you could start with the resources
I mentioned earlier. The miniport samples in DDK are excellent for
educational purposes (however we didn’t follow its design in our
miniport). I personally started with the old ne2000 ISA sample in NT4
DDK.
Developing and sustaining a mass production NDIS miniport driver is an
incredibly complex job - by the time you got your nic driver code
complete and WHQL certified, it’s fair to say you’ve 15-20% of your work
done. I learned this after I worked for nic silicon vendor. NIC driver’s
behaviors could be very system dependent (chipset compliance level,
bios, protocols, IM - native or 3rd party, applications, and OS
explicitly interactions). It also depends on the behaviors on the other
side of the cable. Non-compliant Network switches, routers will affect
it negatively as well. The more futures your nic/OSs support, the more
headache you will have. The optimization (throughout, latency, PEI index
etc) is very challenging which requires a lot of experiments and
experiences and also some very expensive lab equipments. In addition,
unlike most other windows drivers, the synchronization mechanisms for
ndis miniport driver need special work to fit the nature of the NIC. It
would be nice to have a book to cover some of these. It’s indeed a lot
of fun stuff out there but I wonder if such a book will sell well
because you can easily count all Ethernet silicon vendors, especially
those do 1Gbps and 10Gbps chips. It’s also true that hiring NDIS
miniport developers is a big problem even in California.
Programming NIC is fun!
Good luck!
Calvin Guan (DDK MVP) Sr. Staff Engineer
NetXtreme Vista/Longhorn Server Miniport
Broadcom Corporation, Irvine CA 92618
Connecting Everything(r)
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of vimalraj s
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 11:31 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] NDIS reference
Hi all,
I am a newbie in driver developement.I am referring the “Inside
Microsoft Windows 2000” and “Win2k device driver book”. Since i am in
India i cant attend a OSR seminar or Azius Developer Training.
There is only reference for NDIS miniport drivers in the DDK help(and
MSDN) and OSR online. I came to know that In chapter 24 in Windows NT
Device Driver Development by Peter G. Viscarola and W. Anthony Mason
contains some details about NDIS miniport driver.
Please advice me how to get into the this field
Also I am wondering why seasoned programmers in this group is not
helping the new developers by writing a Book for reference in NDIS.
Regards,
vimal
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