Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

The File System Stack of Drivers

To make this all more clear, look at Figure 6.2 to see how the file system drivers stack up and what a request for I/O from a disk file actually looks like.

Figure 6.2. Simplified file system drivers stack.

Note

If you are intimately familiar with network protocol stacks, you might recognize this kind of thing. Networking is commonly implemented in a stack of protocols, as first suggested by the famous seven-layer OSI model. In the case of the Windows 2000 file system I/O stack you see here, functionality is implemented in the same way—as objects that act as layers in a stack and gradually add functionality. ...