FaultyRank: A Graph-based Parallel File System Checker

Similar to local file system checkers such as e2fsck for Ext4, a parallel file system (PFS) checker ensures the file system's correctness. The basic idea of file system checkers is straightforward: important metadata are stored redundantly in separate places for cross-checking; inconsistent metadata will be repaired or overwritten by its ‘more correct' counterpart, which is defined by the developers. Unfortunately, implementing the idea for PFSes is non-trivial due to the system complexity. Although many popular parallel file systems already contain dedicated checkers (e.g., LFSCK for Lustre, BeeGFS-FSCK for BeeGFS, mmfsck for GPFS), the existing checkers often cannot detect or repair inconsistencies accurately due to one fundamental limitation: they rely on a fixed set of consistency rules predefined by developers, which cannot cover the various failure scenarios that may occur in practice.In this study, we propose a new graph-based method to build PFS checkers. Specifically, we model important PFS metadata into graphs, then generalize the logic of cross-checking and repairing into graph analytic tasks. We design a new graph algorithm, FaultyRank, to quantitatively calculate the correctness of each metadata object. By leveraging the calculated correctness, we are able to recommend the most promising repairs to users. Based on the idea, we implement a prototype of FaultyRank on Lustre, one of the most widely used parallel file systems, and compare it with Lustre's default file system checker LFSCK. Our experiments show that FaultyRank can achieve the same checking and repairing logic as LFSCK. Moreover, it is capable of detecting and repairing complicated PFS consistency issues that LFSCK can not handle. We also show the performance advantage of FaultyRank compared with LFSCK. Through this study, we believe FaultyRank opens a new opportunity for building PFS checkers effectively and efficiently.