Understanding configuration dependencies of file systems

Abstract

File systems have many configuration parameters. Such flexibility comes at the price of additional complexity which could lead to subtle configuration-related issues. To address the challenge, we study the potential configuration dependencies of a representative file system (i.e., Ext4), and identify a prevalent pattern called multi-level configuration dependencies. We build a static analyzer to extract the dependencies and leverage the information to address different configuration issues. Our preliminary prototype is able to extract 64 multi-level dependencies with a low false positive rate. Additionally, we can identify multiple configuration issues effectively. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → File systems management; • Computer systems organization → Reliability.

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“…Artificial intelligence techniques are also used in configuration management solutions. Article [39] studies and extracts the dependencies between configuration parameters of the EXT4 file system in Linux. The study categorizes the dependencies into three levels and discusses methods for extracting them and their effects.…”