Re: [CORE] [BUGS] BUG #13350: blindly fsyncing data dir considered harmful

On May 25, 2015 5:12 PM, "Stephen Frost" <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>
> All,
>
> (sending to -core to request a release)
>
> * andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk (andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk) wrote:
> > Operating system: Debian (and probably others)
>
> > The addition of a recursive fsync of the data dir on startup (in the
absence
> > of a clean shutdown) causes startup to fail if the data dir contains
> > symlinks to files which the postgres user can't write to.
> >
> > This is the standard configuration for many SSL-enabled setups,
including
> > the standard debian packaging defaults. Accordingly, crash recovery now
> > ALWAYS fails on such systems without manual intervention.
>
> Andrew did a great job summarizing the problem, don't know that there's
> much to add there.
>
> This was back-patched all the way and released with the latest round of
> minor releases, and given that it means crash recovery fails for a large
> number of deployed systems, I think we need to fix (or revert) the
> recursive fsync change (d8ac77ab178ddb2ae043b8c463cd30c031e793d0 and
> related) and do new releases very shortly.
>

Agreed, this is a pretty bad regression and we need to at least do
something and out out a release asap - either revert or if we can find a
better way (see the other thread about this issue for some other ideas).

It happens to be the default shipment on Debian and Ubuntu but it's
definitely not a platform specific problem I believe, so we should put out
a "real" release and not expect packagers to carry a specific patch for it.

/Magnus