Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

File System Driver Architecture

File system drivers (FSDs) manage file system formats. Although FSDs run in kernel mode, they differ in a number of ways from standard kernel-mode drivers. Perhaps most significant, they must register as an FSD with the I/O manager and they interact more extensively with the memory manager. For enhanced performance, file system drivers also usually rely on the services of the cache manager. Thus, they use a superset of the exported Ntoskrnl functions that standard drivers use. Whereas you need the Windows DDK in order to build standard kernel-mode drivers, you must have the Windows Installable File System (IFS) Kit to build file system drivers. (See Chapter 1 for more information on the DDK, and see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit ...