NDIS is a kind of network protocol standard which supports the network drivers of three kinds: NIC drivers, intermediate drivers and protocol drivers.

For example, more device drivers, such as network interface card (NIC) drivers and parallel and serial port drivers, are available for Linux than for commercial operating systems.

However, there are details worth mentioning because they can make it easier to understand how NIC device drivers are written, and therefore how they interact with the upper networking layers.