This paper shows how to use model checking to find serious errors in file systems. Model checking is a formal verification technique tuned for finding corner-case errors by comprehensively exploring the state spaces de-fined by a system. File systems have two dynamics that make them attractive for such an approach. First, their errors are some of the most serious, since they can destroy persistent data and lead to unrecoverable corruption. Second, traditional testing needs an impractical, exponential number of test cases to check that the system will recover if it crashes at any point during execution. Model checking employs a variety of state-reducing techniques that allow it to explore such vast state spaces efficiently.
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