Maintaining consistency of file system by monitoring file system parameters at runtime using consistency checking rules

Abstract

Current research in the file system domain has shown the existence of bugs that disrupt the working and the consistency of file system operations. File systems today, though have grown more robust to various bugs; however, still they are vulnerable to crashes and corruptions due to bugs that are unknown to the system. The metadata information is an important part of a file system since it keeps the meta information of all the data within it. It is thus necessary to handle this meta information effectively for smooth functioning of the file system. Solutions such as the file system checker tool ‘fsck’, ‘SQCK’ tool, and the technique such as journaling, provide safety measures for maintaining consistency by performing checks against the file system bugs. But, however, these solutions suffer from the limitation that these checks can only be performed while the system is either not in use or is unmounted. This limitation can be overcome with the concept of runtime checking, where files and directories are observed even when the user is still using the system. Thus, in this paper, a runtime checking system is presented that checks various file system parameters that are likely to have a corruption during a working file system.