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DaisyNFS

A verified crash-safe, concurrent NFS server. The idea is to make operations atomic with a verified transaction system from GoTxn, and then verify the atomic behavior of each operation in Dafny. The atomicity justifies using sequential proofs in Dafny to reason about the body of each transaction, which we prove implements an NFS server. This proof strategy combines interactive theorem proving in Perennial, to reason about the tricky concurrency and crash safety in the transaction system, with automated proofs in Dafny for the file-system code.

Architecture

There are three main components:

• The Dafny file-system implementation in src/fs
• The Go interfaces assumed by the Dafny code implemented in dafny_go (the jrnl API is a thin wrapper around the github.com/mit-pdos/go-journal/txn package).
• The NFS server binary that calls the verified Dafny code is implemented between nfsd and cmd/daisy-nfsd.

The Dafny proof is split into three parts:

• external interfaces only assumed in Dafny via {:extern}: src/jrnl (the transaction system) and src/machine (Go primitives)
• verified helper libraries in src/util that would basically be in a decent Dafny standard library
• the actual file-system proof, documented in its own README

At the top level of the repo we also have various scripts. eval and bench have scripts to run performance experiments (see the eval README for more details). artifact has an older setup for running the evaluation on a VM; these days we use an AWS setup. etc has miscellaneous scripts used for debugging and to implement continuous integration.

Compiling

Run make to compile and verify everything, or make compile to just compile from Dafny to Go. Then you can build the server with go build ./cmd/daisy-nfsd.

You'll need Dafny 4:

• On Arch Linux you can get dafny-bin from the AUR
• On macOS use brew install dafny
• For other systems the easiest solution is to download a binary release from https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny/releases, extract it, and add it to your $PATH (this is what we have to do in CI, which runs on Ubuntu 22.04).

Compilation additionally depends on goimports to remove unused imports:

go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports@latest

Then you can run some sanity tests over the bank and file-system examples. These are ordinary Go tests that import the code generated from Dafny and run it, linking with go-nfsd, specifically with its twophase package. To run these tests, after compiling with make compile, run:

go test -v ./tests

Running the NFS server

Linux

You'll need some basic utilities: the rpcbind service to tell the server what port to run on, and the NFS client utilities to mount the file system. On Arch Linux these are available using pacman -S rpcbind nfs-utils and on Ubuntu you can use apt-get install rpcbind nfs-common.

You might need to start the rpcbind service with systemctl start rpcbind. It seems to help if you also run systemctl start rpc-statd (it should be auto-launched when needed, though). The rpcinfo -p command is useful for verifying that an portmapper service is running on port 111.

Now run go run ./cmd/daisy-nfsd to start the server (with an in-memory disk) and sudo mount localhost:/ /mnt/nfs to mount it using the Linux NFS client.

If you encounter an error with the message Too many levels of symbolic links., don't panic! This is actually due to a bug in the Linux NFS client, which was fixed in December 2020 in commit 3b2a09f127e02. If a READDIR result was larger than a page, Linux would simply discard the extra data, resulting in a corrupted response. You'll need at least version 5.11 of the kernel to get the fix (you can check what you have with uname -r).

macOS

On macOS you already have rpcbind and the NFS client utilities, but you'll need to start a couple services with:

sudo launchctl start com.apple.rpcbind
sudo launchctl start com.apple.lockd

You can mount with sudo mount localhost:/ /mnt/nfs as for Linux, or without becoming root in Finder with Go > Connect to server... and connecting to nfs://localhost/.

Developing

We provide a library at dafny_go that exports some external APIs that are axiomatized using {:extern} modules, classes, and methods in Dafny. Some of these are core primitives, like []byte and little-endian encoding, while the big one is the jrnl package which interfaces between Dafny and github.com/mit-pdos/go-nfsd/txn.

The support library is trusted and hence its agreement with the Dafny spec is important.

You can run tests for this support library with go test:

go test ./dafny_go/...

Checking verification performance

To time verification and analyze the results easily, we have a script to process timing from Dafny's /trace option. Use it with the following fish function:

function dafny_time
  set -l file $argv[1]
  dafny /timeLimit:10 /compile:0 /arith:5 /noNLarith /trace $file $argv[2..-1] > .timing.prof
  cat .timing.prof | ./etc/summarize-timing
end

The timing infrastructure itself is implemented as a library in etc/. It even has tests, which you can run with pytest.