Ganon (anon.delete@this.gmail.com) on March 3, 2021 9:05 am wrote:
> A recent pair of papers from facebook emphasized the importance of checksum protection even
> within a single process:
>
> Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem:Efficiency from Exascale
> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast21-pan.pdf
>
> "
> At Tectonic’s scale, with thousands of machines reading and writing a large amount of data every day,
> in-memory data corruption is a regular occurrence, a phenomenon observed in other large-scale systems
> [12,27]. We address this by enforcing checksum checks within and between process boundaries.
> "
>
> and
>
> Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores
> Serving Large-scale Applications:The RocksDB Experience
> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast21-dong.pdf
>
> "
> 11. CPU/memory corruption does happen, though very rarely,
> and sometimes cannot be handled by data replication. (§5)
>
> 12.Integrity protection must cover the entire system in order to prevent corrupted data (e.g.,
> caused by bitflips in CPU/memory) from being exposed to clients or other replicas; detecting
> corruption only when the data is at rest or being sent over the wire is insufficient. (§5)
> "
>
>
> -----
> Checksums & similar protect the data but what about the code (instructions)? The total data footprint
> of instructions is smaller so the bitflips are less likely in practice there. Does hw take special
> measures to protect instructions from corruption (more than it does for data)? What sw measures
> make sense to protect instructions (assuming we need to care about this as well)?


Another interesting paper just published by Facebook:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11245

"Silent Data Corruptions at Scale".