Network Device Interface Specification

Network Device Interface Specification

(networking, hardware, standard)(NDIS) A Microsoft Windows device driver programming interface allowing multipleprotocols to share the same network hardware.E.g. TCP/IP and IPX on the same NIC. NDIS can also beused by some ISDN adapters.

A protocol manager accepts requests from the transport layerand passes them to the data link layer (routed to thecorrect network interface if there is more than one).

NDIS was developed by Microsoft and 3COM. Novell offersa similar device driver for NetWare called Open Data-LinkInterface (ODI).

The NDIS 2.0 specification was 5000 lines.

Latest version: NDIS 5.0, as of 2000-10-30.

http://microsoft.com/hwdev/devdes/ndis5.htm.

cdrom.com NDIS archive.

["3TECH, The 3COM Technical Journal", Winter 1991].