I assume this is 8.4 material.
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Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> >> As regards the zero_damaged_pages question, I raised that some time ago
> >> but we didn't arrive at an explicit answer. All I would say is we can't
> >> allow invalid pages in the buffer manager at any time, whatever options
> >> we have requested, otherwise other code will fail almost immediately.
> >
> > Yeah --- the proposed new bufmgr routine should probably explicitly zero
> > the content of the buffer. It doesn't really matter in the context of
> > WAL recovery, since there can't be any concurrent access to the buffer,
> > but it'd make it safe to use in non-WAL contexts (I think there are
> > other places where we know we are going to init the page and so a
> > physical read is a waste of time).
>
> To implement that correctly, I think we'd need to take the content lock
> to clear the buffer if it's already found in the cache. It doesn't seem
> right to me for the buffer manager to do that, in the worst case it
> could lead to deadlocks if that function was ever used while holding
> another buffer locked.
>
> What we could have is the semantics of "Return a buffer, with either
> correct contents or completely zeroed out". It would act just like
> ReadBuffer if the buffer was already in memory, and zero out the page
> otherwise. That's a bit strange semantics to have, but is simple to
> implement and works for the use-cases we've been talking about.
>
> Patch implementing that attached. I named the function "ReadOrZeroBuffer".
>
> --
> Heikki Linnakangas
> EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
>
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