RE: Do XP drivers work on Vista32? by AntonBassov
AntonBassov
Wed Jul 11 02:50:01 CDT 2007
> 1) Will the driver built for XP32 work on Vista32?
As long as they are written "properly", i.e. in MSFT-supported way, they
should -
even if some features are deprecated in newer OS version, it still should
provide support for them in order to insure backwards compatibility. For
example, Vista provides support for NDIS 5 drivers, although it natively uses
NDIS 6. This is the short story.
The long story is that, in practical terms, it does not always work this
way. For example, MSFT claims that Vista supports "proper" TDI filters.
However, in practice
very few client drivers actually use TDI interface under Vista. For example,
AFD.SYS, via which user-mode Winsock clients communicate with TCPIP.SYS, does
not. In practice, it means that your filter is just a dead code that does not
see
the lion's share of a network traffic. To summarize, everything depends on
underlying architecture - what is true for driver X may be not-so-true for
driver Y, even if MSFT claims otherwise.
> 2) Are the libraries used during build for XP32 and Vista32 different?
Of course - once Vista provides some exports that don't exist under earlier
OS versions, a driver that relies upon them in its code is just not going to
get built if you try to link it against XP libraries. However, as long as you
don't call Vista-specific exports, XP libraries should work just fine
Anton Bassov
"mayur" wrote:
> I have developed a driver for a PCI board which requires only memory &
> interrupt resources. I am using WDK6000 and KMDF1.5 to build the
> driver. I have following questions:
> 1) Will the driver built for XP32 work on Vista32?
> 2) Are the libraries used during build for XP32 and Vista32 different?
>
>