Writing card drivers is quite difficult. That's why Microsoft introduced the "MiniDriver".
The driver model has been very successful for printers since printers have widely different characteristics. Cryptographic operations OTOH leave very little (if any) room for variations. Although cards may differ in features, using unified high-level APIs like the MiniDriver this will either be hard to access or more likely: /Never be utilized/. Open question: Since the MiniDriver gives a unified card API, wouldn't it be easier defining a FIXED API/DRIVER and rather let the cards adapt to that? Certifying a gazillion third-party drivers including multiple card versions doesn't appear to be a particularly swift project. With a fully unified card API you can target all cards with a fairly simple test-suite and delegate the certification to the card vendors. This should dramatically improve system reliability which always has been a weak point, particularly for consumer computers. Anders
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