Windows CAN Driver Release Notes

WDF CAN Driver for Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP
(c) 1997 - 2017 esd electronic system design gmbh

Release Notes

Release notes for the WDF (KMDF) based CAN driver supporting Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP (32-/64-Bit) and Windows Server 2003/2008/2012 (32-/64-Bit). The driver releases are organized as packages. A package contains the driver itself, driver related libraries and files for the driver configuration. The package release version is loosely coupled with the driver versions of the package but a complete package may contain drivers with a higher or lower version number. A summary of which file versions are distributed in which package and what hardware is supported by a particular driver can be found at the end of this document.

Technical differences to previous CAN driver versions

For most of the supported CAN hardware, a Windows Driver Model (WDM) based device driver already exists. The Windows Driver Framework (WDF) supersedes and complements the WDM with the goal to enhance driver robustness and security by providing default implementations for common event handling tasks in the framework. The major revision number of all WDF based driver is 4.x.x whereas the WDM based drivers are 3.x.x or 2.x.x.

In addition to this fundamental change of the driver framework the new driver generation is different to its predecessor in the following technical aspects:

The internal driver architecture is already prepared to handle the larger CAN messages (up to 64 bytes) of the CAN FD standard.
The driver supports power management (standby/hibernate) which is not supported by the 3.x.x WDM drivers.
CAN data is handled by a high priority worker thread at passive level instead of doing the processing in a Deferred Procedure Call (DPC). The advantage is that the DPC latencies caused by a CAN driver are reduced to a minimum and the overall system performance on multicore architectures is improved.
Windows 2000 is no longer supported as the WDF framework only supports Windows XP and later.

Supported CAN hardware

Several driver support more than one esd CAN device. The following table gives an overview on how many and which different CAN devices are supported by a single CAN family device driver. The hardware marked in red is CAN FD enabled.

Driver Family Name	C400	C402	U400	VCAN
Driver Binary (x86/x64)	c400k.sys c400ak.sys	c402k.sys c402ak.sys	u400k.sys u400ak.sys	esdvcank.sys esdvcanak.sys
Supported CAN hardware	CAN-PCI/400 CPCI-CAN/400 CAN-PCIe/400 PMC-CAN/400	CAN-PCIe/402-FD	CAN-USB/400 CAN-USB/400 IRIG-B CAN-USB/400-FD AN-USB/400-FD IRIG-B	Virtual CAN Device Driver (No hardware)

Revision history

Summarized below are the the improvements, changes and fixes between different package releases in reverse chronological order. If a change affects a complete driver family the family name according to the table above is used to refer to the hardware.

Driver Package 4.0.3

2017-01-25

Support for new devices: CAN-PCIe/402-FD added to C402 driver family (x86/x64). Classical CAN C402 support removed for the time being.
Support for new devices: CAN-USB/400-FD and CAN-USB/400-FD IRIG-B added to U400 driver family (x86/x64).
All drivers/devices: Complete support for the CAN FD enabled NTCAN-API.
All drivers/devices: Fixed driver returns NTCAN_ERROR_LOM instead of NTCAN_ERROR_NO_BAUD if no bit rate is configured.
All drivers/devices: Driver disables the CAN controller before the system changes from S0 into a lower power state and does not restore the bit rate after return to S0 to prevent errors on the CAN bus if the configuration has changed in the meantime.
All drivers/devices: The NTCAN_INFO structure now contains the number of open handles.
C400/C402/U400: Fixed situation where an invalid bit rate is reported.
C400/C402/U400: Fixed internal error situation which might cause a hanging process that could not be terminated.
C400/C402/U400: Fixed possible internal overload situation in situations of very high bus load.
VCAN: Device driver now emulates a CAN FD enabled ESDACC.
Configuration: Added support to indicate the triple sampling capability of the CAN controller for Classical CAN.

Driver Package 4.0.2

2016-01-26

Support for new devices: CAN-PCI/402 and CPCIserial-CAN/402 added to C402 driver family (x86/x64).
Support for new devices: Virtual device driver ESDVCAN (no hardware) emulating a Classical CAN SJA1000 CAN controller.
All drivers/devices: Support for Windows 10.
All drivers/devices: Extended the indication of error situations in the event log during startup.
All drivers/devices: Internal performance improvements.
All drivers/devices: Fixed 64-bit version of NTCAN library could not be used on Windows XP x64 because of a missing symbol.
C400: Updated ESDACC core (V 00.61).
C400/C402: Fixed issues where timestamps are not be applied correctly to CAN messages and events in error situations.
C400/C402: Fixed CAN driver aborted a failed Tx I/O request if the CAN controller is in error passive state.
C400: Implicit CAN clock divider in BTR prescaler removed. This change is handled internally backward compatible for exiting applications.
C400: Fixed issues handling bus error situations.
C400: Fixed issue with high speed scheduling configurations.
U400: Internal message handling completely rewritten to increase performance and to deal with situations where messages might get lost due to high DPC latencies caused by other device drivers.
U400: Support for a backward compatible reduction up to 30% of the USB busload (requires FW V00.62) which in turn leads to a reduced CPU load.
U400: Fixed wrong tick frequency in IRIG-B mode after resume from standby/hibernate.
U400: Fixed several issues after resume from standby/hibernate.
U400: Fixed a rare BSOD if the device is connected to a powered USB hub while the PC is rebooted.
PMC-CAN/400: Added support for 1 PPS signal.
Configuration: Improved UI of device manager settings dialog and the adaption to a configured UI theme.
Configuration: Added tool tips for configuration/settings options.
Configuration: Added support for a driver/system settings expert dialog to configure the thread priority of the CAN message handler, decrease the system tick period and enable driver trace messages.
Configuration: Added support to start the event viewer with a driver specific filtered view by double-click on a fail reason code.

Driver Package 4.0.0

2015-06-02

All drivers/devices: Initial release as WDF based driver with an identical functional range as the latest WDM based driver for this CAN hardware.
All drivers/devices: Drivers are based on the KMDF framework 1.9 which requires Windows XP or later to run.
All drivers/devices: All drivers support power management (in comparison to the WDM based V3.x.y CAN drivers).
All drivers/devices: The drivers are ready to process CAN messages with up to 64 bytes for the forthcoming CAN FD support.
All drivers/devices: The main internal CAN message processing is performed (in comparison to the WDM based CAN drivers) on PASSIVE_LEVEL instead on the standard DPC_LEVEL. This approach reduces the overall system latency
C400/C402: Initial release.
C402: The driver requires an ESDACC firmware of V00.53 or later.

Package content

The following table gives an overview which version of the binaries is distributed in a driver package.

Package/ File	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	Description
c400k.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	C400 driver (32-bit)
c402k.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	C402 driver (32-bit)
esdvcank.sys	-	4.0.2	4.0.3	ESDVCAN driver (32-bit)
u400k.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	U400 driver (32-bit)
c400ak.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	C400 driver (64-bit)
c402ak.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	C402 driver (64-bit)
esdvcanak.sys	-	4.0.2	4.0.3	ESDVCAN driver (64-bit)
u400ak.sys	4.0.0	4.0.2	4.0.3	U400 driver (64-bit)
ntcan.dll	4.8.7	4.8.8	5.0.1	NTCAN library(32-/64-bit)
canui32.dll	1.5.0 1.5.1	1.6.0	1.6.1	Property sheet (32-bit)
calcan32.dll	2.6.3	2.6.3	2.6.4	CALCAN library (32-bit)
canui64.dll	1.5.0 1.5.1	1.6.0	1.6.1	Property sheet (64-bit)
calcan64.dll	2.6.3	2.6.3	2.6.4	CALCAN library (64-bit)