Summary: Model­Based Failure Analysis of Journaling File Systems
Vijayan Prabhakaran, Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Computer Sciences Department
1210, West Dayton Street, Madison, Wisconsin
Abstract
We propose a novel method to measure the robustness
of journaling file systems under disk write failures. In our
approach, we build models of how journaling file systems
order disk writes under different journaling modes and use
these models to inject write failures during file system up­
dates. Using our technique, we analyze if journaling file
systems maintain on­disk consistency in the presence of disk
write failures. We apply our technique to three important
Linux journaling file systems: ext3, Reiserfs, and IBM JFS.
From our analysis, we identify several design flaws and cor­
rectness bugs in these file systems, which can cause serious
file system errors ranging from data corruption to unmount­
able file systems.
1 Introduction

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences