Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mahmud, Tabassum, Gatla, Om Rameshwar, Zhang, Duo, Love, Carson, Bumann, Ryan, Girimaji, Varun S, Zheng, Mai
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mahmud, Tabassum
Gatla, Om Rameshwar
Zhang, Duo
Love, Carson
Bumann, Ryan
Girimaji, Varun S
Zheng, Mai
author_facet Mahmud, Tabassum
Gatla, Om Rameshwar
Zhang, Duo
Love, Carson
Bumann, Ryan
Girimaji, Varun S
Zheng, Mai
contents File systems play an essential role in modern society for managing precious data. To meet diverse needs, they often support many configuration parameters. Such flexibility comes at the price of additional complexity which can lead to subtle configuration-related issues. To address this challenge, we study the configuration-related issues of two major file systems (i.e., Ext4 and XFS) in depth, and identify a prevalent pattern called multilevel configuration dependencies. Based on the study, we build an extensible tool called ConfD to extract the dependencies automatically, and create a set of plugins to address different configuration-related issues. Our experiments on Ext4, XFS and a modern copy-on-write file system (i.e., ZFS) show that ConfD was able to extract 160 configuration dependencies for the file systems with a low false positive rate. Moreover, the dependency-guided plugins can identify various configuration issues (e.g., mishandling of configurations, regression test failures induced by valid configurations). In addition, we also explore the applicability of ConfD on a popular storage engine (i.e., WiredTiger). We hope that this comprehensive analysis of configuration dependencies of storage systems can shed light on addressing configuration-related challenges for the system community in general.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems
Mahmud, Tabassum
Gatla, Om Rameshwar
Zhang, Duo
Love, Carson
Bumann, Ryan
Girimaji, Varun S
Zheng, Mai
Operating Systems
File systems play an essential role in modern society for managing precious data. To meet diverse needs, they often support many configuration parameters. Such flexibility comes at the price of additional complexity which can lead to subtle configuration-related issues. To address this challenge, we study the configuration-related issues of two major file systems (i.e., Ext4 and XFS) in depth, and identify a prevalent pattern called multilevel configuration dependencies. Based on the study, we build an extensible tool called ConfD to extract the dependencies automatically, and create a set of plugins to address different configuration-related issues. Our experiments on Ext4, XFS and a modern copy-on-write file system (i.e., ZFS) show that ConfD was able to extract 160 configuration dependencies for the file systems with a low false positive rate. Moreover, the dependency-guided plugins can identify various configuration issues (e.g., mishandling of configurations, regression test failures induced by valid configurations). In addition, we also explore the applicability of ConfD on a popular storage engine (i.e., WiredTiger). We hope that this comprehensive analysis of configuration dependencies of storage systems can shed light on addressing configuration-related challenges for the system community in general.
title Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07118