Re: Checksums by default?

From: Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com>
To: Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Jim Nasby <Jim(dot)Nasby(at)bluetreble(dot)com>, Petr Jelinek <petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Checksums by default?
Date: 2017-01-24 01:38:22
Message-ID: CAM3SWZTkKePc7CK_Bp2-WmhtEsLB0MfStySq1hGfZ4TRXd7ctw@mail.gmail.com
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On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> Not sure how this part of that sentence was missed:
>
> -----
> ... even though they were enabled as soon as the feature became
> available.
> -----
>
> Which would seem to me to say "the code's been running for a long time
> on a *lot* of systems without throwing a false positive or surfacing a
> bug."

I think you've both understood what I said correctly. Note that I
remain neutral on the question of whether or not checksums should be
enabled by default.

Perhaps I've missed the point entirely, but, I have to ask: How could
there ever be false positives? With checksums, false positives are
simply not allowed. Therefore, there cannot be a false positive,
unless we define checksums as a mechanism that should only find
problems that originate somewhere at or below the filesystem. We
clearly have not done that, so ISTM that checksums could legitimately
find bugs in the checksum code. I am not being facetious.

--
Peter Geoghegan

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