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DSN
2008
IEEE

Analyzing the effects of disk-pointer corruption

13 years 10 months ago
Analyzing the effects of disk-pointer corruption
The long-term availability of data stored in a file system depends on how well it safeguards on-disk pointers used to access the data. Ideally, a system would correct all pointer errors. In this paper, we examine how well corruptionhandling techniques work in reality. We develop a new technique called type-aware pointer corruption to systematically explore how a file system reacts to corrupt pointers. This approach reduces the exploration space for corruption experiments and works without source code. We use type-aware pointer corruption to examine Windows NTFS and Linux ext3. We find that they rely on type and sanity checks to detect corruption, and NTFS recovers using replication in some instances. However, NTFS and ext3 do not recover from most corruptions, including many scenarios for which they possess sufficient redundant information, leading to further corruption, crashes, and unmountable file systems. We use our study to identify important lessons for handling corrupt poi...
Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Meenali Rungta, Nitin
Added 29 May 2010
Updated 29 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where DSN
Authors Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Meenali Rungta, Nitin Agrawal, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Michael M. Swift
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