GoTxn: Verifying a Crash-Safe, Concurrent Transaction System

Bugs related to concurrency and crash safety are infamous for being subtle and hard to reproduce. Formal verification provides a way to combat such bugs through the use of machine-checked proofs about program behavior. However, reasoning about concurrency and crashes can be tricky, especially when scaling up to larger systems that must also have good performance. This thesis discusses the verification of GoTxn, the concurrent, crash-safe transaction system underlying the verified Network File System (NFS) server DaisyNFS. It focuses on the specification and proof of the write-ahead log and the automatic two-phase locking interface used to enforce crash and concurrent atomicity in transactions, detailing how the verification framework Perennial can be used to manage assertions about crash behavior across multiple threads. By effectively harnessing concurrency to hide disk access latency, GoTxn enables performance in DaisyNFS similar to the unverified Linux NFS server.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Theng, Mark

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Kaashoek, M. Frans
• Zeldovich, Nickolai
• Chajed, Tej

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143253

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/143253