Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures?

Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures?

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Applications Results #1: False Failures False Failures: Indicate failure but actually succeed

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19 of 23

Applications Results #1: False Failures False Failures: Indicate failure but actually succeed

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Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures?

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  1. 1 Intro
  2. 2 How does data reach the disk?
  3. 3 fsync is really important
  4. 4 It's hard to get durability correct Applications find it difficult
  5. 5 fsync can fail Durability gets harder to get right
  6. 6 Why care about fsync failures? "About a year ago the PostgreSQL community discovered that fsync (on Linux and some BSD systems) may not work the way we always thought it is [sic], with possibly disas…
  7. 7 Our work Systematically understand fsync failures
  8. 8 File System Results
  9. 9 Application Results
  10. 10 Outline
  11. 11 File System | Methodology: Fault Injection
  12. 12 File System Methodology: Workloads Common write patterns in applications • Reduced to simplest form
  13. 13 File System Result #1: Clean Pages Dirty page is marked clean after fsync failure on all three file systems
  14. 14 File System Result #22: Page Content File systems do not handle fsync errors uniformly • Page content depends on file system
  15. 15 File System Result #3: In-memory state In-memory data structures are not entirely reverted
  16. 16 Applications Five widely used applications
  17. 17 Applications Results: Overview Ext4 Ordered Mode
  18. 18 Crash/Restart Simple strategies fail Crash/restart is incorrect recovers wrong data from page cache • Example: PostgreSQL
  19. 19 Applications Results #1: False Failures False Failures: Indicate failure but actually succeed
  20. 20 Late Error Reporting All applications susceptible to data loss on ext4 data mode
  21. 21 Btrfs winning?
  22. 22 Applications Results Summary Simple strategies fail • Applications have moved away from retries
  23. 23 Challenges and Directions

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