PMTest: A Fast and Flexible Testing Framework for Persistent Memory Programs

Sihang Liu, Yizhou Wei, Jishen Zhao, Aasheesh Kolli, Samira Khan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

69 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent non-volatile memory technologies such as 3D XPoint and NVDIMMs have enabled persistent memory (PM) systems that can manipulate persistent data directly in memory. This advancement of memory technology has spurred the development of a new set of crash-consistent software (CCS) for PM - applications that can recover persistent data from memory in a consistent state in the event of a crash (e.g., power failure). CCS developed for persistent memory ranges from kernel modules to user-space libraries and custom applications. However, ensuring crash consistency in CCS is difficult and error-prone. Programmers typically employ lowlevel hardware primitives or transactional libraries to enforce ordering and durability guarantees that are required for ensuring crash consistency. Unfortunately, hardware can reorder instructions at runtime, making it difficult for the programmers to test whether the implementation enforces the correct ordering and durability guarantees. We believe that there is an urgent need for developing a testing framework that helps programmers identify crash consistency bugs in their CCS. We find that prior testing tools lack generality, i.e., they work only for one specific CCS or memory persistency model and/or introduce significant performance overhead. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose PMTest1, a crash consistency testing framework that is both flexible and fast. PMTest provides flexibility by providing two basic assertion-like software checkers to test two fundamental characteristics of all CCS: The ordering and durability guarantee. These checkers can also serve as the building blocks of other application-specific, high-level checkers. PMTest enables fast testing by deducing the persist order without exhausting all possible orders. In the evaluation with eight programs, PMTest not only identified 45 synthetic crash consistency bugs, but also detected 3 new bugs in a file system (PMFS) and in applications developed using a transactional library (PMDK), while on average being 7.1× faster than the state-of-the-art tool.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASPLOS 2019 - 24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages411-425
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450362405
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 4 2019
Event24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019 - Providence, United States
Duration: Apr 13 2019Apr 17 2019

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS

Conference

Conference24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityProvidence
Period4/13/194/17/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

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