Horton

Re: Offline enabling/disabling of data checksums

Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>

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From: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
To: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Cc: Sergei Kornilov <sk@zsrv.org>, Fabien COELHO <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr>, Michael Banck <michael.banck@credativ.de>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-03-14T00:23:42Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 12:24:21PM +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> Enabling or disabling the checksums offline on the master quite clearly
> requires a rebuild of the standby, there is no other way (this is one of
> the reasons for the online enabling in that patch, so I still hope we can
> get that done -- but not for this version).

I am curious to understand why this would require a rebuild of the
standby.  Technically FPWs don't update the checksum of a page when it
is WAL-logged, so even if a primary and a standby don't agree on the
checksum configuration, it is the timing where pages are flushed in
the local instance which counts for checksum correctness.

> You mean if the backend and pg_checksums is built with different blocksize?
> Yeah, that sounds like something which is a cheap check and should be done.

Yes, we should check after that, checksum calculation uses BLCKSZ with
a hardcoded value, so a mismatch would cause computation failures.  It
could be possible to not have this restriction if we made the block
size an argument of the checksum calculation though.
--
Michael

Commits

  1. Reorganize Notes section in documentation of pg_checksums

  2. Add option -N/--no-sync to pg_checksums

  3. Add options to enable and disable checksums in pg_checksums

  4. Refactor more code logic to update the control file

  5. Rename pg_verify_checksums to pg_checksums

  6. Fix cross-version compatibility checks of pg_verify_checksums

  7. Add routine able to update the control file to src/common/