Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1810.02904

Finding Crash-Consistency Bugs with Bounded Black-Box Crash Testing

Jayashree Mohan·Ashlie Martinez·Soujanya Ponnapalli·Pandian Raju·Vijay Chidambaram
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

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.

Explore related subjects

cs.OS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Jayashree Mohan, Ashlie Martinez, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Pandian Raju, Vijay Chidambaram. 2018-10-05. Finding Crash-Consistency Bugs with Bounded Black-Box Crash Testing. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02904

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

TierBPF: Page Migration Admission Control for Tiered Memory via eBPF

Software-based memory tiering systems decide which pages to place on the slower or faster tier. However, they do not consider two important factors that greatly influence application performance: the size of the migrated pages, and the underlying hardware device and tiering topology. We introduce TierBPF, a software mechanism that can be plugged into existing memory tiering systems to take these factors into account, by making architecture-aware page admission decisions. TierBPF is implemented as a set of eBPF hooks, allowing users to define their custom policies. In order to make its decisions, TierBPF utilizes a lightweight tracking mechanism for page profiling which is not dependent on the application's working set size. TierBPF, integrated into three memory tiering systems and evaluated with 17 workloads, achieves geomean throughput gains of up to 15.9% with improvements of up to 75% for individual workloads.

cs.OS↗
arXiv2026

Don't Let AI Agents YOLO Your Files: Information and Control in Agent-Native Filesystems

AI coding agents regularly misuse their filesystem access, causing data corruption, loss, and leakage. We conduct the first systematic study of this problem through an analysis of 290 public reports. Our study reveals two fundamental gaps: users and agents have limited information about filesystem effects and insufficient control over them. To close these gaps, we propose to shift information and control from agents to filesystems. We introduce agent-native filesystems and identify three primitives they should provide: introspect effects, undo mutations, and gate accesses. These primitives let agents operate autonomously while reserving user interaction for sensitive accesses and final review. We build YoloFS, an agent-native filesystem. YoloFS stages mutations until the user commits them, snapshots intermediate states for agent self-correction, and uses progressive permission to let users adapt access rules during execution. We evaluate YoloFS with a new methodology that captures interactions among the user, agent, and filesystem. On 11 tasks with hidden side effects, YoloFS enables agents to self-correct in 8 and stages all mutations for user review. On 112 routine tasks, YoloFS reduces user interaction while matching the baseline success rate. YoloFS is open-sourced at https://github.com/YoloFS/YoloFS.

cs.OS↗
arXiv2026

Netkit: Specializing Linux Packet Delivery for Container Networks

Cloud-native microservices architectures rely on network namespaces for isolation, with the overhead of container communications remaining a critical performance bottleneck. While colocating containers on the same host mitigates some of this overhead, it cannot match the performance of communication within a single network namespace. Existing solutions either require application rewrites or fail to support the full Linux network stack expected by containerized applications. In this paper, we present netkit, an eBPF-based datapath that specializes the Linux networking stack to eliminate redundant backlog queue traversals during network namespace transitions. netkit leverages eBPF to transparently redirect packets between namespaces, bypassing unnecessary buffering while preserving compatibility with existing container applications. Our implementation in the Linux kernel, integrated with minimal changes to the Cilium network plugin for Kubernetes, improves throughput by up to 37\% and achieves parity between container-to-container and process-to-process communications, effectively closing the performance gap introduced by namespace isolation.

cs.OS↗