Re: unexpected data beyond EOF and character encoding

Jaime Silvela <JSilvela(at)bear(dot)com> writes:
> The kernel is Linux 2.6.5

2.6.5.what (give us full uname -a output please)? On what hardware?
If memory serves, we had some reason to think that it only occurred on
specific 64-bit multi-CPU platforms, so I'm not just asking idly.
The error check was put in as a consequence of this thread:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2006-09/msg00250.php

> So I take it that this happens on the restore part, not the dump part then?

It's definitely a write failure not a read failure. Per the code comments:

* We get here only in the corner case where we are trying to extend
* the relation but we found a pre-existing buffer marked BM_VALID.
* This can happen because mdread doesn't complain about reads beyond
* EOF --- which is arguably bogus, but changing it seems tricky ---
* and so a previous attempt to read a block just beyond EOF could
* have left a "valid" zero-filled buffer. Unfortunately, we have
* also seen this case occurring because of buggy Linux kernels that
* sometimes return an lseek(SEEK_END) result that doesn't account for
* a recent write. In that situation, the pre-existing buffer would
* contain valid data that we don't want to overwrite. Since the
* legitimate cases should always have left a zero-filled buffer,
* complain if not PageIsNew.

regards, tom lane