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

  • Authors:

  • Junfeng Yang;Can Sar;Dawson Engler

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University;Stanford University;Stanford University

  • Venue:
  • OSDI '06 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 7
  • Year:
  • 2006

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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.