[mauvehaus]

Microsoft did (does?) Installable File System plugfests. The anti-virus vendors always had a pretty full dance card because they go to great lengths to scan files, which is sometimes at odds with other drivers.

We had a hierarchical storage management driver, and getting files released to remote storage and keeping them released until the users actually wanted them back was helped greatly by actually being able to talk to the AV vendors and understand their criteria for when to scan.

At the time, a lot of AV filter drivers were legacy model drivers, which led to some serious shenanigans getting a second minifilter installed above the AV layer in the stack to distinguish between user and AV generated reads.

[bob1029]

This stuff is probably the most esoteric part of windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/i...

[mrguyorama]

It's like the mod load order from hell.

I've always wanted an excuse to write a minifilter or similar and solve a real problem and totally not at all hose my system's performance. Windows kernel development calls to me for no good reason.