Summary: IRON File Systems
Vijayan Prabhakaran, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Nitin Agrawal, Haryadi S. Gunawi,
Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison
{vijayan,laksh,nitina,haryadi,dusseau,remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
ABSTRACT
Commodity file systems trust disks to either work or fail com­
pletely, yet modern disks exhibit more complex failure modes. We
suggest a new fail­partial failure model for disks, which incorpo­
rates realistic localized faults such as latent sector errors and block
corruption. We then develop and apply a novel failure­policy fin­
gerprinting framework, to investigate how commodity file systems
react to a range of more realistic disk failures. We classify their
failure policies in a new taxonomy that measures their Internal RO­
bustNess (IRON), which includes both failure detection and recov­
ery techniques. We show that commodity file system failure poli­
cies are often inconsistent, sometimes buggy, and generally inade­
quate in their ability to recover from partial disk failures. Finally,
we design, implement, and evaluate a prototype IRON file system,
Linux ixt3, showing that techniques such as in­disk checksumming,

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