IFS in Windows NT
When Microsoft stopped developing OS/2 and concentrated on what was then called OS/2 NT, they took the IFS ideas with it, along with the HPFS filesystem.
Instead of being a four-piece scheme they implemented a two-piece scheme. microIFS and miniIFS were removed from the scheme. IFS and helpers remain as the same, but later, in Windows NT 4.0, a defragmentation helper (DEFRAG) was added. Microsoft's original NTLDR was coded for loading the NT kernel from FAT, HPFS or NTFS, but subsequent versions dropped HPFS support. All of the drivers and helpers became 32-bit PE executables. The FAT file system was moved out of the Kernel to an IFS and was heavily optimized for performance, taking advantage of the 32-bit processing capabilities (being called FASTFAT).
Original Windows NT 3.1 incorporated FAT, HPFS (Pinball) and the newly created NTFS drivers, along with a new and improved CD-ROM filesystem driver that incorporated long file names using the Microsoft Joliet filesystem.
Windows NT 3.51 added per-file compression to NTFS and to the IFS interface. In Windows NT 4.0 the HPFS was removed. In Windows 2000 FASTFAT was updated to support FAT32 and UDF was added.
Windows 2000 modified the IFS interface to add per-file encryption.
Network file-sharing protocols and antivirus are also implemented using IFS.
Apple started including read only HFS+ drivers in Mac OS X 10.6's version of Boot Camp for use in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.
Read more about this topic: Installable File System
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