Title
Understanding and dealing with hard faults in persistent memory systems
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe advent of Persistent Memory (PM) devices enables systems to actively persist information at low costs, including program state traditionally in volatile memory. However, this trend poses a reliability challenge in which multiple classes of soft faults that go away after restart in traditional systems turn into hard (recurring) faults in PM systems. In this paper, we first characterize this rising problem with an empirical study of 28 real-world bugs. We analyze how they cause hard faults in PM systems. We then propose Arthas, a tool to effectively recover PM systems from hard faults. Arthas checkpoints PM states via fine-grained versioning and uses program slicing of fault instructions to revert problematic PM states to good versions. We evaluate Arthas on 12 real-world hard faults from five large PM systems. Arthas successfully recovers the systems for all cases while discarding 10× less data on average compared to state-of-the-art checkpoint-rollback solutions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3447786.3456252
European Conference on Computer Systems
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.35
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brian Choi110.35
Randal Burns21955115.15
Peng Huang330917.16