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.