Re: Temporary file access API

On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:54 AM Antonin Houska <ah(at)cybertec(dot)at> wrote:
> Do you think that the use of a system call is a problem itself (e.g. because
> the code looks less simple if read/write is used somewhere and fread/fwrite
> elsewhere; of course of read/write is mandatory in special cases like WAL,
> heap pages, etc.) or is the problem that the system calls are used too
> frequently? I suppose only the latter.

I'm not really super-interested in reducing the number of system
calls. It's not a dumb thing in which to be interested and I know that
for example Thomas Munro is very interested in it and has done a bunch
of work in that direction just to improve performance. But for me the
attraction of this is mostly whether it gets us closer to TDE.

And that's why I'm asking these questions about adopting it in
different places. I kind of thought that your previous patches needed
to encrypt, I don't know, 10 or 20 different kinds of files. So I was
surprised to see this patch touching the handling of only 2 kinds of
files. If we consolidate the handling of let's say 15 of 20 cases into
a single mechanism, we've really moved the needle in the right
direction -- but consolidating the handling of 2 of 20 cases, or
whatever the real numbers are, isn't very exciting.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com