Re: pread() and pwrite()

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2018-Nov-04, Thomas Munro wrote:
>> Here's a patch to add Windows support by supplying
>> src/backend/port/win32/pread.c. Thoughts?

> Hmm, so how easy is to detect that somebody runs read/write on fds where
> pread/pwrite have occurred? I guess for data files it's easy to detect
> since you'd quickly end up with corrupted files, but what about other
> kinds of files? I wonder if we should be worrying about using this
> interface somewhere other than fd.c and forgetting about the limitation.

Yeah. I think the patch as presented is OK; it uses pread/pwrite only
inside fd.c, which is a reasonably non-leaky abstraction. But there's
definitely a hazard of somebody submitting a patch that depends on
using pread/pwrite elsewhere, and then that maybe not working.

What I suggest is that we *not* try to make this a completely transparent
substitute. Instead, make the functions exported by src/port/ be
"pg_pread" and "pg_pwrite", and inside fd.c we'd write something like

#ifdef HAVE_PREAD
#define pg_pread pread
#endif

and then refer to pg_pread/pg_pwrite in the body of that file. That
way, if someone refers to pread and expects standard functionality
from it, they'll get a failure on platforms not supporting it.

FWIW, I tested the given patches on HPUX 10.20; they compiled cleanly
and pass the core regression tests.

regards, tom lane