Overview of NDIS Driver Types - Windows drivers
Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) supports the following driver types.
learn.microsoft.comHere is the latest high-level update on Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS).
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NDIS remains the core Windows standard for bridging protocol drivers and network adapter drivers, and Microsoft continues to evolve it through newer miniport and protocol driver interfaces. The most recent widely adopted milestones include NDIS 6.40 and its successors, which target modern Windows platforms and servers. These versions introduce more flexible driver chaining and enhanced packet handling capabilities, while preserving compatibility with older NDIS versions.[4][5]
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Recent public summaries emphasize that NDIS defines a standard API for initialization, configuration, data transmission, and event handling between protocol stacks and NIC drivers, enabling broad hardware and software interoperability. The evolution path historically tracks through multiple generations (NDIS 6.x onward) with incremental feature improvements and runtime reconfiguration support.[2][3][5]
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For practical guidance and current developer resources, Microsoft’s Network Driver Design Guide and the Windows Driver Kit samples (e.g., PassThru) remain the official starting points for implementing or updating NDIS drivers and intermediate drivers within the Windows driver model.[1][4]
If you’d like, I can pull the exact latest version numbers and summarize the key new features and backward-compatibility notes from the official Microsoft documentation and recent technical articles, and provide direct links.
- Would you prefer a concise feature-focused summary or a version-by-version timeline?
Citations:
- NDIS overview and driver interactions[2]
- NDIS evolution, 6.x series and runtime changes[5]
- Microsoft design guides and samples for developers[1][4]