Ferrite

This project develops crash-consistency models, analogous to memory consistency models, which describe the behavior of a file system across crashes. Crash-consistency models include both litmus tests, which demonstrate allowed and forbidden behaviors, and axiomatic and operational specifications. We define a formal framework for developing crash-consistency models, and a toolkit, called Ferrite, for validating those models against real file system implementations. We develop a crash-consistency model for ext4, and use Ferrite to demonstrate unintuitive crash behaviors of the ext4 implementation. To demonstrate the utility of crash-consistency models to application writers, we use our models to prototype proof-of-concept verification and synthesis tools, as well as new library interfaces for crash-safe applications.

Publications

• James Bornholt, Antoine Kaufmann, Jialin Li, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Emina Torlak, and Xi Wang. Specifying and Checking File System Crash-Consistency Models. In Proc. of the 21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Apr 2016. [pdf] [slides]

Software

The source code is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/uwplse/ferrite.