Re: Page Checksums

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>

From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: David Fetter <david@fetter.org>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Aidan Van Dyk <aidan@highrise.ca>, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2011-12-19T17:10:37Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
* David Fetter (david@fetter.org) wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 09:34:51AM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > > Fair enough, but, could we distinguish these two cases?  In other words,
> > > would it be possible to detect if a page was torn due to a 'traditional'
> > > crash and not complain in that case, but complain if there's a CRC
> > > failure and it *doesn't* look like a torn page?
> > 
> > No.
> 
> Would you be so kind as to elucidate this a bit?

I'm guessing, based on some discussion on IRC, that it's because we
don't really 'detect' torn pages today, when it's due to a hint-bit-only
update.  With all the trouble due to hint-bit updates, and if they're
written out or not, makes me wish we could just avoid doing hint-bit
only updates to disk somehow..  Or log them when we do them.  Both of
those have their own drawbacks, of course.

	Thanks,

		Stephen