filesystem-consistency-invariant · research · also File-system consistency invariant

Filesystem consistency invariant

A filesystem consistency invariant is a rule relating filesystem metadata that must hold at a defined consistency boundary.

Related Observatory article: Filesystem consistency invariant on hesela.com

Recon checked metadata relationships at transaction commit; this differs from validating a block checksum. Its 2012 evaluation was ext3-focused. The 2014 follow-up checked per-write location invariants as well, rather than assuming transactional writes were correct.

Relations

related

checksum, data-scrubbing, crash-consistency, write-ahead-log, copy-on-write

Limitations

• Coverage depends on the specified rules, observation point and implementation; it does not establish application-level correctness. [1, 2]

Citations

1. Fryer et al. Recon: Verifying File System Consistency at Runtime. FAST 2012, sections 2, 4.1 and 5 (accessed 2026-10-13)
2. Fryer et al. Checking the Integrity of Transactional Mechanisms. FAST 2014, sections 3.1 and 5 (accessed 2026-10-13)
3. Hesela: Disk scrubbing, checksum coverage and consistency boundaries (accessed 2026-10-13)

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