Summary: Dependability Analysis of Virtual Memory Systems
Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram
Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin, Madison
1210 West Dayton St., Madison, WI­53706
{laksh, dusseau, remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
Abstract
Recent research has shown that even modern hard disks
have complex failure modes that do not conform to ``fail­
stop'' operation. Disks exhibit partial failures like block
access errors and block corruption. Commodity operating
systems are required to deal with such failures as commod­
ity hard disks are known to be failure­prone. An important
operating system component that is exposed to disk failures
is the virtual memory system. In this paper, we examine the
failure handling policies of different virtual memory systems
for different classes of partial disk errors. We use type and
context aware fault injection to explore as many of the inter­
nal code paths as possible. From experiments, we find that

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences