Modeling and Verifying MooseFS in CSP

Moose File System (MooseFS) is an Open-source, POSIX-compliant distributed file system, which provides a high throughput access to application data and is suitable for applications that have large data sets. Its high performance, high availability and fault-tolerant features have drawn huge interest from industry. However, the correctness of the dominate parts including reading and writing files of MooseFS has not got much attention of academia, which is the main concern of industry. In this paper, we use the process algebra Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) to model and analyze MooseFS. We mainly focus on the dominant parts which include reading and writing files in MooseFS and formalize them in detail. On that basis, we use the model checker Failures Divergence Refinement (FDR) to automatically simulate the developed model and verify whether the model is consistent with the specification and exhibits relevant secure properties including deadlock freedom, divergence-free, mutual exclusion and backup scheme.