From: Eric W Hanson [ehanson@microsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:01 PM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] RE: Difference b/w TDI and Protocol Drivers

There are three basic classes of TDI drivers.  TDI Providers which are
protocol drivers.  TDI Clients that sit over the TDI Providers.  And
then TDI filters which are purely filter drivers that happen to be
layering on top of TDI Providers

Packet.sys is a protocol that has a private IOCTL interface on the upper
edge.  Applications can talk directly to it via IOCTLs.  The TCPIP.SYS
that ships with the OS has a TDI interface.  In the Windows NT 4.0 DDK
there is a protocol called ST (for simple transport).  This protocol has
a TDI upper edge which allows it plug into the Windows NT networking
stack at the TDI layer.  TDI Clients can access the ST sample through
the TDI interface provided by TDI.SYS.  AFD.SYS is a TDI client which
implements the kernel portion of the Winsock API.  AFD can work with
protocol drivers that supply a TDI upper edge if  a Winsock helper DLL
is supplied with the protocol.  TDI protocols can also get NETBIOS to
bind on top of them.

If it is only your application accessing the protocol then a private
IOCTL interface would usually suffice.  However if you want all Winsock
applications to work over your protocol then a TDI Protocol is the best
solution. - Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Chandandeep Singh Pabla [mailto:chandan.pabla@dcmtech.co.in] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 4:44 AM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Difference b/w TDI and Protocol Drivers


Hi all,

Can anybody tell the precise difference b/w the Protocol and TDI
drivers?? I am bit confused about it as TDI drivers also calls same
functions as Protocol drivers calls such as
ndisregisterprotocol,ndisopen adapter etc... Where does the exact
difference comes into picture??? I know that TDI drivers r used to
provide consistent interface with applications but what exactly is the
difference?? TDI drivers also don't seems to have Iocreatesymboliclink
which is there in protocol drivers,then how does applications access
tdi?? I know the question might seems elementary but I am confused :-(
It would be much helpful if u clarify these doubts with reference to
Samples in ddk4 i.e. packet driver( I suppose it is a protocol driver)
and tdi driver sample.

please help.

Chandan

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