Re: Block-level CRC checks

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> What might be interesting is to report CRC mismatches if the database
>> was shut down cleanly previously;  I think in those cases we shouldn't
>> have torn pages.
>
> Unfortunately that's not true. You can crash, leading to a torn page,
> and then start up the database and shut it down cleanly. The torn page
> is still there, even though the last shutdown was a clean one.

Thinking through this, as I understand it, in order to prevent this
problem, you'd need to be able to predict at recovery time which pages
might have been torn by the unclean shutdown. In order to do that,
you'd need to know which pages were waiting to be written to disk at
the time of the shutdown. For ordinary page modifications, that's not
a problem, because there will be WAL records for those pages that need
to be replayed, and we could recompute the CRC at the same time. But
for hint bit changes, there's no persistent state that would tell us
which hint bits were in the midst of being flipped when the system
went down, so the only way to make sure all the CRCs are correct would
be to rescan every page in the entire cluster and recompute every CRC.

Is that right?

...Robert