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This paper develops a new approach to verifying a performant file system that isolates crash safety and concurrency reasoning to a transaction system that gives atomic access to the disk, so that the rest of the file system can be verified with sequential reasoning. We demonstrate this approach in DaisyNFS, a Network File System (NFS) server written in Go that runs on top of a disk. DaisyNFS uses GoTxn, a new verified, concurrent transaction system that extends GoJournal with two-phase locking and an allocator. The transaction system's specification formalizes under what conditions transactions can be verified with only sequential reasoning, and comes with a mechanized proof in Coq that connects the specification to the implementation. As evidence that proofs enjoy sequential reasoning, DaisyNFS uses Dafny, a sequential verification language, to implement and verify all the NFS operations on top of GoTxn. The sequential proofs helped achieve a number of good properties in DaisyNFS: easy incremental development (for example, adding support for large files), a relatively short proof (only 2x as many lines of proof as code), and a performant implementation (at least 60% the throughput of the Linux NFS server exporting ext4 across a variety of benchmarks). 

The main contribution of this paper is GoJournal, a verified, concurrent journaling system that provides atomicity for storage applications, together with Perennial 2.0, a framework for formally specifying and verifying concurrent crash-safe systems. GoJournal’s goal is to bring the advantages of journaling for code to specs and proofs. Perennial 2.0 makes this possible by introducing several techniques to formalize GoJournal’s specification and to manage the complexity in the proof of GoJournal’s implementation. Lifting predicates and crash framing make the specification easy to use for developers, and logically atomic crash specifications allow for modular reasoning in GoJournal, making the proof tractable despite complex concurrency and crash interleavings. GoJournal is implemented in Go, and Perennial is implemented in the Coq proof assistant. While verifying GoJournal, we found one serious concurrency bug, even though GoJournal has many unit tests. We built a functional NFSv3 server, called GoNFS, to use GoJournal. Performance experiments show that GoNFS provides similar performance (e.g., at least 90% throughput across several benchmarks on an NVMe disk) to Linux’s NFS server exporting an ext4 file system, suggesting that GoJournal is a competitive journaling system. We also verified a simple NFS server using GoJournal’s specs, which confirms that they are helpful for application verification: a significant part of the proof doesn’t have to consider concurrency and crashes.