Dokany

In case you create a file system – other than the standard ones, namley FAT or NTFS – then you need to develop a system driver that works in kernel mode on windows. Dokan is a utility similar to FUSE in Linux that enables you to create the compatible system files that do not suffer any modifications.

Dokany is a fork for Dokan, as the project is no longer maintained, and features a user and kernel mode file system driver. Similarly to its predecessor, first you need to install the system driver and then you can create the file systems that can be viewed and managed as normal in Windows. Consequentially, the app that creates these file systems via the tool is dubbed File system application.

Any file operation requests done from the user programs are sent to the Windows I/O subsystem, which works in the kernel by default, and then forwarded to the file system driver created via this tool. Employing the functions provided by the tool enables you to register additional callback operations to the said driver. Simply put, the driver invokes the callback routines to respond to the requests sent in this manner and sends them back to the user program.