Crash Consistency: Rethinking the Fundamental Abstractions of the File System

The reading and writing of data, one of the most fundamental aspects of any Von Neumann computer, is surprisingly subtle and full of nuance. For example, consider access to a shared memory in a system with multiple processors. While a simple and intuitive approach known as strong consistency is easiest for programmers to understand, many weaker models are in widespread use (e.g., x86 total store ordering); such approaches improve system performance, but at the cost of making reasoning about system behavior more complex and error-prone. Fortunately, a great deal of time and effort has gone into thinking about such memory models, and, as a result, most multiprocessor applications are not caught unaware.