Re: Temporary file access API

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> 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.

There are't really that many kinds of files to encrypt:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Transparent_Data_Encryption#List_of_the_files_that_contain_user_data

(And pg_stat/* files should be removed from the list.)

--
Antonin Houska
Web: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com