On the Reproducibility of Bugs in File-System Aware Storage Applications

Many storage applications such as file system checkers, defragmentation tools, etc. require a detailed understanding of file systems. Such file-system aware applications play an essential role today, but unfortunately they are error-prone. To better understand the challenges as well as the opportunities to address the issues, this paper presents an empirical study of real world bugs in file-system aware storage applications. By analyzing 59 bug cases from 4 representative applications in depth, we derive multiple insights in terms of general bug patterns, triggering conditions, and implications for building effective tools to address the issues. We hope that our study and the resulting dataset could contribute to the development of reliability tools for building robust file-system aware storage applications in general.