Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems
Tabassum Mahmud, Om Rameshwar Gatla, Duo Zhang, Carson Love, Ryan, Bumann, Varun S Girimaji, Mai Zheng

TL;DR
This paper investigates configuration dependencies in file systems, introduces ConfD for automatic extraction, and demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying configuration issues across multiple systems.
Contribution
It presents the first comprehensive analysis of configuration dependencies in file systems and develops ConfD, an extensible tool for automatic dependency extraction and issue detection.
Findings
ConfD extracted 160 dependencies with low false positives
Plugins identified various configuration issues and regressions
ConfD applied successfully to multiple file systems and storage engines
Abstract
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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Data Storage Technologies · Advanced Database Systems and Queries · Multimedia Communication and Technology
