SquirrelFS - Using the Rust Compiler to Check File-System Crash Consistency

Explore a groundbreaking approach to building crash-safe file systems for persistent memory in this 16-minute conference talk from OSDI '24. Discover how researchers from the University of Texas at Austin leverage Rust's typestate pattern to enforce compile-time checks on operation order. Learn about the novel crash-consistency mechanism called Synchronous Soft Updates, which simplifies crash safety to enforcing metadata update ordering. Delve into SquirrelFS, a new file system with compile-time crash-consistency guarantees that eliminates the need for separate proofs. Understand how successful compilation indicates crash consistency, while errors provide debugging starting points. Compare SquirrelFS's performance against state-of-the-art file systems like NOVA and WineFS across various benchmarks and applications.