Title: Finding Crash-Consistency Bugs with Bounded Black-Box Crash Testing,
Abstract: We present a new approach to testing file-system crash consistency: bounded
black-box crash testing (B3). B3 tests the file system in a black-box manner
using workloads of file-system operations. Since the space of possible
workloads is infinite, B3 bounds this space based on parameters such as the
number of file-system operations or which operations to include, and
exhaustively generates workloads within this bounded space. Each workload is
tested on the target file system by simulating power-loss crashes while the
workload is being executed, and checking if the file system recovers to a
correct state after each crash. B3 builds upon insights derived from our study
of crash-consistency bugs reported in Linux file systems in the last five
years. We observed that most reported bugs can be reproduced using small
workloads of three or fewer file-system operations on a newly-created file
system, and that all reported bugs result from crashes after fsync() related
system calls. We build two tools, CrashMonkey and ACE, to demonstrate the
effectiveness of this approach. Our tools are able to find 24 out of the 26
crash-consistency bugs reported in the last five years. Our tools also revealed
10 new crash-consistency bugs in widely-used, mature Linux file systems, seven
of which existed in the kernel since 2014. Our tools also found a
crash-consistency bug in a verified file system, FSCQ. The new bugs result in
severe consequences like broken rename atomicity and loss of persisted files.