| Faculty name: | Angela Demke Brown |
|---|---|
| Research area: | computer systems, operating systems, compiler design |
| Campus address: | BA5228 |
| Campus phone: | 416-946-8080 |
| Email address: |
demke [at] cs.toronto.edu
|
| Number of students: | 1 |
| Skills required: |
|
This project involves improving the reliability of file system software. When file systems are buggy, they can corrupt data on disk, causing a serious problem, because unlike memory-only corruption, restarting software, such as the operating system, does not resolve the disk corruption. Currently, the only method for dealing with file system corruption is to use an offline file system checker, but these checkers are very slow and notoriously buggy themselves.
We have developed a system that ensures that a file system will remain consistent even in the face of file system bugs. The key idea is that all file system operations that update the disk are verified externally (outside of the file system software which may be buggy) against a set of consistency properties that ensure file system consistency. In this project, the summer student will evaluate the performance of our system. Time permitting, the student will implement a component that allows writing the file-system consistency properties more easily, using a high-level domain-specific language, such as Datalog.