Re: [Fwd: PGBuildfarm member narwhal Branch HEAD Status changed from OK to InstallCheck failure]

Dave Page <dpage(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> I've been seeing this failure intermittently on Narwhal HEAD, and once
> on 8.1. Other branches have been OK, as have other animals running on
> the same physical box. Narwhal-HEAD is run more often than any other
> builds however.

> Anyone have any idea what might be wrong? It seems unlikely to be a
> hardware issue given that it's the exact same test failures each time.

Yeah, I'd been wondering about that too, but have no clue what's up.
It seems particularly odd that all the failures are in installcheck
not check.

If you want to poke at it, I'd suggest changing the ERROR to PANIC
(it's in bufmgr.c) to cause a core dump, run installchecks till you
get a panic, and then look around in the dump to see what you can find.
It'd be particularly interesting to see what the buffer actually
contains. Also you could look at the corresponding page of the disk
file (which in theory should be the same as the buffer contents,
since this error check is only made just after a read() ...)

regards, tom lane