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The ADvanced Systems Laboratory (ADSL)
Publication abstract

Refuse to Crash with Re-FUSE

Swaminathan Sundararaman, Laxman Visampalli, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau,
Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract:

We introduce Re-FUSE, a framework that provides support for restartable user-level file systems. Re-FUSE monitors the user-level file-system and on a crash transparently restarts the file system and restores its state; the restart process is completely transparent to applications. Re-FUSE provides transparent recovery through a combination of novel techniques, including request tagging, system-call logging, and non-interruptible system calls. We tested Re-FUSE with three popular FUSE file systems: NTFS-3g, SSHFS, and AVFS. Through experimentation, we show that Re-FUSE induces little performance overhead and can tolerate a wide range of file-system crashes. More critically, Re-FUSE does so with minimal modiļ¬cation of existing FUSE file systems, thus improving robustness to crashes without mandating intrusive changes.

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