links: Chronological entries

Link: IRON File Systems

IRON File Systems [PDF] is a paper from the 2005 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. To quote from the abstract:

Commodity file systems trust disks to either work or fail completely, yet modern disks exhibit more complex failure modes. We suggest a new fail-partial failure model for disks, which incorporates realistic localized faults such as latent sector errors and block corruption. We then develop and apply a novel failure-policy fingerprinting framework, to investigate how commodity file systems react to a range of more realistic disk failures. [...]

They did their primary analysis on Linux ext3, ReiserFS 3, and (Linux) JFS; the results are comprehensive, interesting, and sometimes scary.