Practical Bug Detection for Persistent Memory Systems

João Gonçalves, Miguel Matos, and Rodrigo Rodrigues. 2023. Mumak: Efficient and Black-Box Bug Detection for Persistent Memory. In Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys ’23), May 8–12, 2023, Rome, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3552326.3587447

João Gonçalves, José Fragoso Santos, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Miguel Matos. 2026. Vardalith: Hybrid Detection of Persistent Memory Concurrency Bugs. To appear in ECOOP'26.

Installation

We provide containers with all the required dependencies. The base dockerfile offers build arguments to control the PMDK version and base operating system used (helpful when combining with target applications with specific dependencies). Here are some example builds:

docker build -t mumak:1.6 . --build-arg PMDK_VERSION=tags/1.6
docker build -t mumak:1.8 . --build-arg PMDK_VERSION=tags/1.8
docker build -t mumak:1.12.1-ubuntu20 . --build-arg PMDK_VERSION=tags/1.12.1 --build-arg BASE_OS=ubuntu:20.04

To guarantee the freshest PMDK version when rebuilding the container, either pass --no-cache (very time consuming) or --build-arg REFRESH="$(date)" (uses cache for all dependencies, rebuilds from scratch).

sudo docker build -t mumak:master --build-arg PMDK_VERSION=master --build-arg BASE_OS=ubuntu:18.04 --build-arg REFRESH="$(date)"

When running the container, make sure to mount the PM filesystem, as well as the auxiliary tmpfs:

docker run -it -v /mnt/pmem0:/mnt/pmem0 -v /mnt/ramdisk:/mnt/ramdisk mumak:version

If you want to build Mumak & Vardalith from scratch, make sure you have rust, cargo, gcc, g++ and make installed. In addition to this:

1. Download and uncompress PIN.
2. Set PIN_ROOT and add it to PATH:

export PIN_ROOT=/path/to/pin
export PATH=$PATH:$PIN_ROOT

3. Compile the tools inside the src/ folder:

cd src
make

Usage Guides

• Mumak Usage Guide
• Vardalith Usage Guide

EuroSys'23 Artifact Evaluation

Mumak's Artifact Evaluation folder contains all the necessary instructions and scripts used to reproduce the results and the figures from the original paper.

Code structure

• src/instrumentation contains various instrumentation tools implemented using PIN and some utilities, used both by Mumak and Vardalith.
• src/analysis contains Vardalith's static analysis.
• src/patching contains Vardalith's patching scripts.
• src/runtime contains Vardalith's PIFR monitoring race detection runtime.
• src/vardalith contains Vardalith's cli.
• docker contains auxiliary docker configurations for targets and other state-of-the-art bug detection tools
• mumak is a script that acts as a frontend to our tool
• configs contains pre-defined configuration files to analyze different targets using the frontend script
• scripts contains some auxiliary scripts

Additional help

How to configure Intel Optane DCPMM

1. Ensure Persistent Memory is working in App Direct Mode (this requires a reboot afterwards, more information here)

sudo ipmctl create -goal PersistentMemoryType=AppDirect

If the latter fails with an error such as:

Create region configuration goal failed: Error 124 - Namespaces exist on specified DIMMs. They have to be removed before running this command.

Try this:

sudo ndctl destroy-namespace -f all

2. Create a namespace in fsdax mode (more information here) using the following command which defaults to the fsdax mode and region 0:

sudo ndctl create-namespace -r 0

3. Confirm the created namespace with the following command:

sudo ndctl list

4. Mount Ext4-DAX using the previous created namespace:

sudo mkdir /mnt/pmem0
sudo mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 -E stride=512 -F /dev/pmem0
sudo mount -o dax /dev/pmem0 /mnt/pmem0
sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/pmem0

Note that these tools uses an additional tmpfs mount to store temporary data. Create it as follows:

sudo mkdir /mnt/ramdisk
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=50G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk
sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/ramdisk

The results reported in the original paper were obtained using the configuration described above. Although it is not recommended for artifact evaluation purposes, you can simulate PM using a tmpfs as described below:

sudo mkdir /mnt/pmem0
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=50G tmpfs /mnt/pmem0
sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/pmem0

For applications that use PMDK, ensure that PMEM_IS_PMEM_FORCE is 1:

export PMEM_IS_PMEM_FORCE=1