Re: pg_verify_checksums and -fno-strict-aliasing

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 03:55:51PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
>> Some of these places might be performance-critical enough that adding
>> a palloc/pfree cycle would not be nice.  What I was considering doing
>> was inventing something like
>>
>> typedef union PGAlignedBuffer
>> {
>> 	char	data[BLCKSZ];
>> 	double	force_align;
>> } PGAlignedBuffer;
> 
> Here's a proposed patch using that approach.

This solution is smarter than using malloc/palloc to enforce alignment.
I was digging into the GIN and bloom code with this pattern, but except
if I used TopTransactionContext for a simple approach, which is not
acceptable by the way, I was finishing with ugly memory contexts
used...  I am still not sure if that was completely correct either, this
needed more time ;)

> Although some of the places that were using "char buf[BLCKSZ]" variables
> weren't doing anything that really requires better alignment, I made
> almost all of them use PGAlignedBuffer variables anyway, on the grounds
> that you typically get better memcpy speed for aligned than unaligned
> transfers.

Makes sense.

> I also fixed a few places that were using the palloc solution, and
> one that was actually doing hand-alignment of the pointer (ugh).
> I didn't try to be thorough about getting rid of such pallocs,
> just fix places that seemed likely to be performance-critical.

Okay, for the memo replay_image_masked and master_image_masked
in xlog.c could make use of the new structure.  SetWALSegSize in
pg_standby.c and WriteEmptyXLOG in pg_resetwal.c, and pg_upgrade's
file.c could also be patched.

walmethods.c could also use some static buffers, not worth the
complication perhaps..  

> +typedef union PGAlignedBuffer
> +{
> +	char		data[BLCKSZ];
> +	double		force_align_d;
> +	int64		force_align_i64;
> +} PGAlignedBuffer;
> +
> +/* Same, but for an XLOG_BLCKSZ-sized buffer */
> +typedef union PGAlignedXLogBuffer
> +{
> +	char		data[XLOG_BLCKSZ];
> +	double		force_align_d;
> +	int64		force_align_i64;
> +} PGAlignedXLogBuffer;

One complain I have is about the name of those structures.  Perhaps
PGAlignedBlock and PGAlignedXlogBlock make more sense?
--
Michael