Re: Enabling Checksums - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: Enabling Checksums
Date
Msg-id 5134EEE6.3070903@2ndQuadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Enabling Checksums  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com>)
Responses Re: Enabling Checksums  (Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakangas@vmware.com>)
Re: Enabling Checksums  (Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On 3/4/13 2:11 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> It's crunch time. Do you and Jeff believe this patch should be
> committed to Postgres core?

I want to see a GUC to allow turning this off, to avoid the problem I 
saw where a non-critical header corruption problem can cause an entire 
page to be unreadable.  A variation on that capable of turning this off 
altogether, as Craig suggested, is a good idea too.

Those are both simple fixes, and I would be pleased to see this 
committed at that point.

I'll write up a long discussion of filesystem trends and why I think 
this is more relevant than ever if that's the main objection now.  There 
is no such thing as a stable release of btrfs, and no timetable for when 
there will be one.  I could do some benchmarks of that but I didn't 
think they were very relevant.  Who cares how fast something might run 
when it may not work correctly?  btrfs might as well be /dev/null to me 
right now--sure it's fast, but maybe the data won't be there at all. 
How long has it taken the Linux kernel to reach the point it handles 
write barriers and fsync correctly?  It does not give me a lot of 
confidence that now is the time they'll suddenly start executing on 
database filesystem mechanics perfectly.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com



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