postgresql bug report (fwd) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 14:50:58 -0400
From: Jack Howarth <howarth@nitro.med.uc.edu>
To: scrappy@hub.org
Subject: postgresql bug report

Marc,     In porting the RedHat 6.0 srpm set for a linuxppc release we
believe a bug has been identified in
the postgresql source for 6.5-0.beta1. Our development tools are as
follows...

glibc 2.1.1 pre 2
linux 2.2.6
egcs 1.1.2
the latest binutils snapshot

The bug that we see is that when egcs compiles postgresql at -O1 or
higher (-O0 is fine),
postgresql creates incorrectly formed databases such that when the user
does a destroydb
the database can not be destroyed. Franz Sirl has identified the problem
as follows...
   it seems that this problem is a type casting/promotion bug in the
source. The   routine _bt_checkkeys() in backend/access/nbtree/nbtutils.c calls
int2eq() in   backend/utils/adt/int.c via a function pointer
*fmgr_faddr(&key[0].sk_func). As   the type information for int2eq is lost via the function pointer,
the compiler   passes 2 ints, but int2eq expects 2 (preformatted in a 32bit reg)
int16's.   This particular bug goes away, if I for example change int2eq to:
   bool   int2eq(int32 arg1, int32 arg2)   {           return (int16)arg1 == (int16)arg2;   }
   This moves away the type casting/promotion "work" from caller to the
callee and   is probably the right thing to do for functions used via function
pointers.

...because of the large number of changes required to do this, Franz
thought we should
pass this on to the postgresql maintainers for correction. Please feel
free to contact
Franz Sirl (Franz.Sirl-kernel@lauterbach.com) if you have any questions
on this bug
report.

--
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Jack W. Howarth, Ph.D.                                     231 Bethesda Avenue
NMR Facility Director                              Cincinnati, Ohio 45267-0524
Dept. of Molecular Genetics                              phone: (513) 558-4420
Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine                    fax: (513) 558-8474