Re: [BUGS] BUG #13350: blindly fsyncing data dir considered harmful

All,

(sending to -core to request a release)

* andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk (andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk) wrote:
> Operating system: Debian (and probably others)

> The addition of a recursive fsync of the data dir on startup (in the absence
> of a clean shutdown) causes startup to fail if the data dir contains
> symlinks to files which the postgres user can't write to.
>
> This is the standard configuration for many SSL-enabled setups, including
> the standard debian packaging defaults. Accordingly, crash recovery now
> ALWAYS fails on such systems without manual intervention.

Andrew did a great job summarizing the problem, don't know that there's
much to add there.

This was back-patched all the way and released with the latest round of
minor releases, and given that it means crash recovery fails for a large
number of deployed systems, I think we need to fix (or revert) the
recursive fsync change (d8ac77ab178ddb2ae043b8c463cd30c031e793d0 and
related) and do new releases very shortly.

Thanks!

Stephen