Re: BUG #5725: server couldn't start when installing on liveCD

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of lun oct 25 23:37:31 -0300 2010:
>> If this really is caused by a WAL setting that's incompatible with the
>> filesystem, maybe we should add a HINT. This makes two reports today,
>> plus apparently at least one more on the Ubuntu sight.

> Maybe we should retry the syscall without the flag in the EINVAL case.
> It's not a critical flag for correctness, just desired for performance.

It's not really apparent to me that we should jump through hoops
to support a configuration that nobody would ever use "for real".
I think it'd be sufficient if we could add a HINT suggesting to use a
different wal_sync_method if we get EINVAL here. Packagers who ship
Postgres on live CDs that have this problem could also consider changing
the default sync method, if they know that the alternatives have similar
performance anyway on their platform.

regards, tom lane