CrashTuner
Jie Lu, Chen Liu, Lian Li, Xiaobing Feng, Feng Yuan Tan, Jun Yang, Liang You · 2019
Crash-recovery bugs (bugs in crash-recovery-related mechanisms) are among the most severe bugs in cloud systems and can easily cause system failures. It is notoriously difficult to detect crash-recovery bugs since these bugs can only be exposed when nodes crash under special timing conditions. This paper presents CrashTuner, a novel fault-injection testing approach to combat crash-recovery bugs. The novelty of CrashTuner lies in how we identify fault-injection points (crash points) that are likely to expose errors. We observe that if a node crashes while accessing meta-info variables, i.e., variables referencing high-level system state information (e.g., an instance of node or task), it often triggers crash-recovery bugs. Hence, we identify crash points by automatically inferring meta-info variables via a log-based static program analysis. Our approach is automatic and no manual specification is required.