Intermediate Driver Binding Operations (NDIS 5.1)
Note NDIS 5. x has been deprecated and is superseded by NDIS 6. x. For new NDIS driver development, see Network Drivers Starting with Windows Vista. For information about porting NDIS 5. x drivers to NDIS 6. x, see Porting NDIS 5.x Drivers to NDIS 6.0.
When a NIC becomes available, NDIS calls the ProtocolBindAdapterfunction of any intermediate driver that can bind to that NIC.
An intermediate driver must provide the protocol binding operations documented in Protocol Driver Binding Operations.
Binding-time actions include allocating and initializing a NIC-specific context area for the binding, initializing any virtual miniports, and calling NdisOpenAdapterto bind to the adapter.
Intermediate drivers should always allocate packet pools to copy packets. In addition, such drivers should:
Allocate a packet pool for each binding.
Allocate different pools for send and receive.
Note Intermediate drivers should allocate packet pools even though the driver does not modify the packets or the driver uses packet stacks. Packet stacking does not guarantee that there is always a stack location available.
For information about the requirement to allocate and manage packets, see Intermediate Driver Packet Management.