Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Irvine

UC Irvine Previously Published Works bannerUC Irvine

Towards Verifying Crash Consistency

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

Compute Express Link (CXL) memory sharing, persistent memory, and other related technologies allow data to survive crash events. A key challenge is ensuring that data is consistent after crashes such that it can be safely accessed. While there has been much work on bug-finding tools for persistent memory programs, these tools cannot guarantee that a program is crash-consistent. In this paper, we present a language, CrashLang, and its type system, that together guarantee that well-typed data structure implementations written in CrashLang are crash-consistent. CrashLang leverages the well-known commit-store pattern in which a single store logically commits an entire data structure operation. In this paper, we prove that well-typed CrashLang programs are crash-consistent, and provide a prototype implementation of the CrashLang compiler. We have evaluated CrashLang on five benchmarks: the Harris linked list, the Treiber stack, the Michael–Scott queue, a Read-Copy-Update binary search tree, and a Cache-Line Hash Table. We experimentally verified that each implementation correctly survives crashes.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.