On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 10:25:24AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2022 at 11:22 PM Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
> > > Yes, but it could be false positives in some cases. For instance, the
> > > column {oid, bool, XLogRecPtr} should be okay on ALIGNOF_DOUBLE == 4
> > > and 8 platforms but the new test fails.
> >
> > I'm happy with that, because the affected author should look for padding-free
> > layouts before settling on your example layout. If the padding-free layouts
> > are all unacceptable, the author should update the expected sanity_check.out
> > to show the one row where the test "fails".
> Perhaps instead we ought to legislate that NAMEDATALEN must
> be a multiple of 8, or some such thing.
>
> The other constraint, that typalign='d' fields must always fall on an
> 8 byte boundary, is probably less annoying in practice, but it's easy
> to imagine a future catalog running into trouble. Let's say we want to
> introduce a new catalog that has only an Oid column and a float8
> column. Perhaps with 0-3 bool or uint8 columns as well, or with any
> number of NameData columns as well. Well, the only way to satisfy this
> constraint is to put the float8 column first and the Oid column after
> it, which immediately makes it look different from every other catalog
> we have.
> AFAICS, we could do that by:
>
> 1. De-supporting platforms that have this problem, or
> 2. Introducing new typalign values, as Noah proposed back on April 2, or
> 3. Somehow forcing values that are sometimes 4-byte aligned and
> sometimes 8-byte aligned to be 8-byte alignment on all platforms
On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 10:04:06AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 9:52 AM Peter Eisentraut
> <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> > That means changing the system's ABI, so in the extreme case you then
> > need to compile everything else to match as well.
>
> I think we wouldn't want to do that in a minor release, but doing it
> in a new major release seems fine -- especially if only AIX is
> affected.
"Everything" isn't limited to PostgreSQL. The Perl ABI exposes large structs
to plperl; a field of type double could require the AIX user to rebuild Perl
with the same compiler option.
Overall, this could be a textbook example of choosing between:
- Mild harm (unaesthetic column order) to many people.
- Considerable harm (dump/reload instead of pg_upgrade) to a small, unknown,
possibly-zero quantity of people.
Here's how I rank the options, from most-preferred to least-preferred:
1. Put new eight-byte fields at the front of each catalog, when in doubt.
2. On systems where double alignment differs from int64 alignment, require
NAMEDATALEN%8==0. Upgrading to v16 would require dump/reload for AIX users
changing NAMEDATALEN to conform to the new restriction.
3. Introduce new typalign values. Upgrading to v16 would require dump/reload
for all AIX users.
4. De-support AIX.
5. From above, "Somehow forcing values that are sometimes 4-byte aligned and
sometimes 8-byte aligned to be 8-byte alignment on all platforms".
Upgrading to v16 would require dump/reload for all AIX users.
6. Require -qalign=natural on AIX. Upgrading to v16 would require dump/reload
and possible system library rebuilds for all AIX users.
I gather (1) isn't at the top of your ranking, or you wouldn't have written
in. What do you think of (2)?
