Horton

Re: should frontend tools use syncfs() ?

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

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From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
Cc: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>, Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@oss.nttdata.com>, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Michael Brown <michael.brown@discourse.org>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2023-10-09T20:48:23Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Wed, Oct 04, 2023 at 10:29:07AM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 01:56:08PM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> We have a collection of platform-specific notes in chapter 19, including
>> file-system-related notes in section 19.2.  Maybe it could be put there?
> 
> I will give this a try.

I started on this, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't the
right place for these notes.  This chapter is about setting up a server,
and the syncfs() notes do apply to the recovery_init_sync_method
configuration parameter, but it also applies to a number of server/client
applications.

I've been looking around, and I haven't found a great place to move this
section to.  IMO some of the other appendices have similar amounts of
information (e.g., Date/Time Support, The Source Code Repository, Color
Support), so maybe a dedicated appendix isn't too extreme.  Another option
could be to introduce a new section for platform-specific notes, but that
would just make this section even larger for now.

Thoughts?

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

Commits

  1. Adjust documentation for syncfs().

  2. Improve the naming in wal_sync_method code.

  3. Allow using syncfs() in frontend utilities.

  4. Add support for syncfs() in frontend support functions.

  5. Make enum for sync methods available to frontend code.

  6. Move PG_TEMP_FILE* macros to file_utils.h.

  7. Change client-side fsync_fname() to report errors fatally