NDIS 6.0 Design Objectives

Two major objectives have guided the design and development of NDIS 6.0:

  1. Enhancing driver performance and scalability. (See Enhanced Performance and Scalability for more information.)

    Major improvements in the following provide significant performance gains for both clients and servers:

    • Network data packaging
    • Send and receive paths
    • Run-time reconfiguration capabilities
    • Scatter/gather DMA
    • Filter drivers
    • Multiprocessor scaling of received data handling
    • Offloading TCP tasks to NICs
  2. Simplifying the NDIS driver model. (See Simplified Driver Model for more information.)

    The following improvements simplify driver development:

    • Streamlined driver initialization
    • Versioning support for NDIS interfaces
    • Simplified reset handling
    • A standard interface for obtaining management information
    • A filter driver model to replace filter intermediate drivers