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Category Archives: Windows
Windows Filesystems: File Object Relationships
One of the challenges of developing file systems in Windows is related to the complex relationships that exist between various data structures in the operating system that are part of the file systems domain. In this post I want to discuss one aspect of this complex relationship because it leads to behavior that makes sense […]
File System Driver: Create
The usual place to start when building a file system is to think about the Create operation. This may also be referred to as an open operation, but that conflates the object with the handle. I think of Create as being “create a handle to the object”. The creation of the object itself can be […]
File System Driver: Structure
I thought I would discuss the structure of my driver and why I chose to structure it the way that I have done. Of course, I could change the structure of the driver again, but I will need to see a compelling reason to do so. First, I will note that the driver has changed […]
Setting up Debugging
No matter how many times I do this over the years, I find it to be a slow and painful process – install a clean virtual machine image, set up kernel debugging, install the (test signed) driver. It never ceases to amaze me how non-intuitive it is to set up talk to the new VM […]
Starting the Skeleton Driver
In my last post, I installed the WDK (and described why I want to build a file system driver). I started up Visual Studio 2019, said I wanted to create a new project, narrowed down the options to “WDK” related projects, and scrolled down to the WDM driver option. I’m not building a WDM driver, […]
Let’s Build a Windows File System
It’s been a while since I upgraded my Windows kernel development tools, so I thought I’d write about the steps I’m taking to do so. How you build a Windows file system has changed over the years but the basic structure of the file system driver itself has not. At the time I’m writing this, […]
US Patent 9,830,329 Issued
US Patent 9,830,329 issued November 28, 2017. It is about a technique for utilizing a pre-existing tunneling mechanism to invoke remote functionality. The original inspiration for this was the need to communicate from a component on a client system to utilize functionality available on the server. The first case for this was when I wanted […]
Windows and “reserved names”
I’ve fallen into the habit of answering some questions on Quora and those which involve answering questions about Windows file systems seem to garner the most interest and the most disagreement. Yesterday I answered a question entitled Why can’t I save a folder name “con” in Windows? I decided to respond to this because the other […]
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