hairbrained idea

[Brian Dessent]

Brian Dessent wrote:

> There exist open source read/write IFS drivers for ext2 under windows,
> e.g. <http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd>.

I've been thinking about this on and off and have come up with two
serious problems:

A) the open source ext2fsd linked above is read-only.  I must have been
confusing it with other free-but-no-source-available or not-free-at-all
ext2 driver.

B) bypassing the windows filesystem layers for standard file access (and
instead talking directly to the driver) would probably not work so well
in that the kernel's file cache would be oblivious, and there would
probably be a resulting performance penalty.

It sucks that there seems to be very little documentation on windows
IFS.  I have the windows DDK but apparently the IFS DDK is a whole
separate product that is not free, and there is only one good published
book[1] on the topic that is out of print and hideously expensive.  

So, I guess this idea can be shelved, at least without someone with a
lot of specific domain knowledge.

Brian

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565922492/104-6172203-7871950