[pl-seminar] Cindy's practice talk

[Steve Jackson <sjackso@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The PL seminar meets on Thursday afternoon.  This is Cindy's practice  
talk for PLDI; please come and give her feedback!
Title: Error Propagation Analysis for File Systems
Thursday May 14th, 4:00pm, Room 3310 CS

Abstract
Unchecked errors are especially pernicious in operating system file  
management code. Transient or permanent hardware failures are  
inevitable, and error-management bugs at the file system layer can  
cause silent, unrecoverable data corruption. We propose an  
interprocedural static analysis that tracks errors as they propagate  
through file system code. Our implementation detects overwritten, out- 
of-scope, and unsaved unchecked errors. Analysis of four widely-used  
Linux file system implementations (CIFS, ext3, IBM JFS and ReiserFS),  
a relatively new file system implementation (ext4), and shared virtual  
file system (VFS) code uncovers 312 error propagation bugs. Our flow-  
and context-sensitive approach produces more precise results than  
related techniques while providing better
diagnostic information, including possible execution paths that  
demonstrate each bug found.
This is joint work with Haryadi S. Gunawi, Ben Liblit, Remzi H. Arpaci- 
Dusseau, and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau.
This is a practice talk for PLDI 2009.