Although ubiquitous, modern filesystems have rather complex behaviours that are hardly understood by programmers and lead to severe software bugs such as data corruption. As a first step to ensure correctness of software performing file I/O, we formalize the semantics of the Linux ext4 filesystem, which we integrate with the weak memory consistency semantics of C/C++. We further develop an effective model checking approach for verifying programs that use the filesystem. In doing so, we discover and report bugs in commonly-used text editors such as vim, emacs and nano.

@article{paperbot1151,
  title = {PerSeVerE: persistency semantics for verification under ext4},
  author = {Michalis Kokologiannakis and Ilya Kaysin and Azalea Raad and Viktor Vafeiadis},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {5},
  number = {POPL},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1145/3434324}
}