Network Adapter drivers

What does a network adapter driver do?

A network adapter driver is written to the Network Driver Interface Specification, so Windows always calls it as an NDIS miniport no matter what silicon is underneath. This is the abstraction that lets the same TCP/IP stack ride over a wired controller, a wireless card, a cellular modem, or a virtual switch. The miniport presents send and receive rings to the operating system and moves frames between those rings and the hardware's DMA buffers.

Much of the driver's value is in hardware offloads that keep the processor free. It advertises checksum offload so the adapter computes IP, TCP, and UDP checksums instead of the CPU, and large send offload, or TCP segmentation offload, so a big buffer is chopped into wire-sized segments by the hardware. Receive Side Scaling spreads incoming interrupts across processor cores so a fast link does not saturate a single core.

Read the full network adapter driver explainer

Compatibility is model-specific

A driver is associated with hardware identifiers, an operating-system driver model, and a processor architecture. Devices in the same category can expose different controllers, firmware interfaces, and optional feature layers, so a category name alone does not establish package compatibility.

Where this driver fits in Windows

The network adapter driver sits between Windows, the applications you use, and the physical hardware. This layered view shows where the driver translates operating-system requests into device actions.