Trustworthy File Systems accepted to PLOS
7th October 2013
09:00
liamoc.net

The Trustworthy File Systems project has had a paper accepted into PLOS this year. I am one of the co-authors.

I think it gives a good overview of our project, our research position, and what we are trying to achieve. It also gives a few tantalising details about the language I’m working on, CDSL (edit: now called Cogent).

Gabi Keller, Toby Murray, Sidney Amani, Liam O’Connor, Zilin Chen, Leonid Ryzhyk, Gerwin Klein and Gernot Heiser
File Systems Deserve Verification Too!
Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), November, 2013

Full PDF Available from NICTA’s page.

File systems are too important, and current ones are too buggy, to remain unverified. Yet the most successful verification methods for functional correctness remain too expensive for current file system implementations — we need verified correctness but at reasonable cost. This paper presents our vision and ongoing work to achieve this goal for a new high-performance flash file system, called BilbyFs. BilbyFs is carefully designed to be highly modular, so it can be verified against a high-level functional specification one component at a time. This modular implementation is captured in a set of domain specific languages from which we produce the design-level specification, as well as its optimised C implementation. Importantly, we also automatically generate the proof linking these two artefacts. The combination of these features dramatically reduces verification effort. Verified file systems are now within reach for the first time.

data61 verification publication plos file-systems cogent