Article

EXPLODE: a lightweight, general system for finding serious storage system errors

Authors:

Junfeng Yang,

Can Sar,

Dawson EnglerAuthors Info & Claims

OSDI '06: Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 7

Page 10

Published: 06 November 2006 Publication History

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Abstract

Storage systems such as file systems, databases, and RAID systems have a simple, basic contract: you give them data, they do not lose or corrupt it. Often they store the only copy, making its irrevocable loss almost arbitrarily bad. Unfortunately, their code is exceptionally hard to get right, since it must correctly recover from any crash at any program point, no matter how their state was smeared across volatile and persistent memory.

This paper describes EXPLODE, a system that makes it easy to systematically check real storage systems for errors. It takes user-written, potentially system-specific checkers and uses them to drive a storage system into tricky corner cases, including crash recovery errors. EXPLODE uses a novel adaptation of ideas from model checking, a comprehensive, heavy-weight formal verification technique, that makes its checking more systematic (and hopefully more effective) than a pure testing approach while being just as lightweight.

EXPLODE is effective. It found serious bugs in a broad range of real storage systems (without requiring source code): three version control systems, Berkeley DB, an NFS implementation, ten file systems, a RAID system, and the popular VMware GSX virtual machine. We found bugs in every system we checked, 36 bugs in total, typically with little effort.

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Liu JHao XArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RChajed T(2024)Shadow Filesystems: Recovering from Filesystem Runtime Errors via Robust Alternative ExecutionProceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems10.1145/3655038.3665942(15-22)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3655038.3665942
Sun JLi SXu JHuang J(2023)The Security War in File Systems: An Empirical Study from A Vulnerability-centric PerspectiveACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/360602019:4(1-26)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3606020
Sun XSuresh LGanesan AAlagappan RGasch MTang LXu TAngel SKasikci BKohler E(2021)Reasoning about modern datacenter infrastructures using partial historiesProceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3458336.3465276(213-220)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458336.3465276
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EXPLODE: a lightweight, general system for finding serious storage system errors
OSDI '06: Proceedings of the 7th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

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OSDI '06: Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 7

November 2006

53 pages

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USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 06 November 2006

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Liu JHao XArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RChajed T(2024)Shadow Filesystems: Recovering from Filesystem Runtime Errors via Robust Alternative ExecutionProceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems10.1145/3655038.3665942(15-22)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3655038.3665942
Sun JLi SXu JHuang J(2023)The Security War in File Systems: An Empirical Study from A Vulnerability-centric PerspectiveACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/360602019:4(1-26)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3606020
Sun XSuresh LGanesan AAlagappan RGasch MTang LXu TAngel SKasikci BKohler E(2021)Reasoning about modern datacenter infrastructures using partial historiesProceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3458336.3465276(213-220)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458336.3465276
Jia ZLi SYu TLiao XWang JDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Automatically detecting missing cleanup for ungraceful exitsProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338938(751-762)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338938
Mohan JMartinez APonnapalli SRaju PChidambaram V(2019)CrashMonkey and ACEACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/332027515:2(1-34)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3320275
Mohan JMartinez APonnapalli SRaju PChidambaram VArpaci-Dusseau AVoelker G(2018)Finding crash-consistency bugs with bounded black-box crash testingProceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3291168.3291172(33-50)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3291168.3291172
Liu HWang XLi GLu SYe FTian C(2018)FCatchACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296957.317716153:2(419-431)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296957.3177161
Gatla OZheng MHameed MDubeyko VManzanares ABlagojevic FGuyot CMateescu R(2018)Towards Robust File System CheckersACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/328103114:4(1-25)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3281031
Liu HWang XLi GLu SYe FTian CShen XTuck JBianchini RSarkar V(2018)FCatchProceedings of the Twenty-Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3173162.3177161(419-431)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173162.3177161
Pillai TAlagappan RLu LChidambaram VArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RKuenning GWaldspurger C(2017)Application crash consistency and performance with CCFSProceedings of the 15th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/3129633.3129650(181-196)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3129633.3129650
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