Refuse to crash with Re-FUSE

We introduce Re-FUSE, a framework that provides support for restartable user-level file systems. Re-FUSE monitors the user-level file-system and on a crash transparently restarts the file system and restores its state; the restart process is completely transparent to applications. Re-FUSE provides transparent recovery through a combination of novel techniques, including request tagging, system-call logging, and non-interruptible system calls. We tested Re-FUSE with three popular FUSE file systems: NTFS-3g, SSHFS, and AVFS. Through experimentation, we show that Re-FUSE induces little performance overhead and can tolerate a wide range of file-system crashes. More critically, Re-FUSE does so with minimal modification of existing FUSE file systems, thus improving robustness to crashes without mandating intrusive changes. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.0 [Software]: General—File system Reliability General Terms Reliability, Fault tolerance, Performance Keywords FUSE, Restart...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Swaminathan Sundararaman, Laxman Visampalli, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
• Keywords: Call Logging, EUROSYS 2011, Fault Tolerance, Software Engineering, System Reliability