On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:15:21AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > ah, now i see. just to clarify, does *all* filesystem access > (including NTFS) go thru the VFS? or are there some filesystems that > differ sufficiently from the VFS model that they provide their own ... > access implementations? (not sure that's the best way to phrase it, > but i'm sure you know what i mean.) Everything goes through the VFS layer first (although its more high level than the BSD VFS). A file system may opt out of the lower layer helpers but it cannot opt out of the VFS.