Re: Offline enabling/disabling of data checksums

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 10:01:20AM +0100, Fabien COELHO wrote:
> The implementation basically removes a lot of copy paste and calls the new
> update_controlfile function instead. I like removing useless code:-)

Yes, I spent something like 10 minutes looking at that code yesterday
and I agree that removing the control file to recreate it is not
really necessary, even if the window between its removal and
recreation is short.

> I do not see the value of *not* fsyncing the control file when writing it,
> as it is by definition very precious, so I added a fsync. The server side
> branch uses the backend available "pg_fsync", which complies with server
> settings there and can do nothing if fsync is disabled.

The issue here is that trying to embed directly the fsync routines
from file_utils.c into pg_resetwal.c messes up the inclusions because
pg_resetwal.c includes backend-side includes, which themselves touch
fd.h :(

In short your approach avoids some extra mess with the include
dependencies. .

> Maybe the two changes could be committed separately.

I was thinking about this one, and for pg_rewind we don't care about
the fsync of the control file because the full data folder gets
fsync'd afterwards and in the event of a crash in the middle of a
rewind the target data folder is surely not something to use, but we
do for pg_checksums, and we do for pg_resetwal. Even if there is the
argument that usually callers of update_controlfile() would care a
lot about the control file and fsync it, I think that we need some
control on if we do the fsync or not because many tools have a
--no-sync and that should be fully respected. So while your patch is
on a good track, I would suggest to do the following things to
complete it:
- Add an extra argument bits16 to update_controlfile to pass a set of
optional flags, with NOSYNC being the only and current value. The
default is to flush the file.
- Move the wait event calls WAIT_EVENT_CONTROL_FILE_WRITE_UPDATE and
WAIT_EVENT_CONTROL_FILE_SYNC_UPDATE to controldata_utils.c.
- And then delete UpdateControlFile() in xlog.c, and use
update_controlfile() instead to remove even more code. The version in
xlog.c uses BasicOpenFile(), so we should use also that in
update_controlfile() instead of OpenTransientFile(). As any errors
result in a PANIC we don't care about leaking fds.
--
Michael