Robust consistency checking for modern filesystems

Abstract

We describe our approach to building a runtime file system checker for the emerging Linux Btrfs file system. Such checkers verify the consistency of file system metadata update operations before they are committed to disk, thus preventing corrupted updates from becoming durable. The consistency checks in Btrfs are complex and need to be expressed clearly so that they can be reasoned about and implemented reliably, thus we propose writing the checks declaratively. This approach reduces the complexity of the checks, ensures their independence, and helps identify the correct abstractions in the checker. It also shows how the checker can be made robust against arbitrary file system corruption.