Horton

Re: pg_verify_checksums and -fno-strict-aliasing

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

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From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Michael Banck <michael.banck@credativ.de>, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>, Fabien COELHO <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr>, pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2018-08-30T22:11:40Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2018-08-30 14:46:06 -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
>> One way to fix it would be to memcpy in/out the modified PageHeader, or
>> just do offset math and memcpy to that offset.

> It took me a bit to reproduce the issue (due to sheer stupidity on my
> part: no, changing the flags passed to gcc to link pg_verify_checksums
> doesn't do the trick), but the above indeed fixes the issue for me.

I suspect people will complain about the added cost of doing that.

I've been AFK all afternoon, but what I was intending to try next was
the union approach, specifically union'ing PageHeaderData with the uint32
array representation needed by pg_checksum_block().  That might also
end up giving us code less unreadable than this:

	uint32		(*dataArr)[N_SUMS] = (uint32 (*)[N_SUMS]) data;


BTW, not to mention the elephant in the room, but: is it *really* OK
that pg_checksum_page scribbles on the page buffer, even temporarily?
It's certainly quite horrid that there aren't large warnings about
that in the function's API comment.

			regards, tom lane

Commits

  1. Avoid using potentially-under-aligned page buffers.

  2. Code review for pg_verify_checksums.c.

  3. Make checksum_impl.h safe to compile with -fstrict-aliasing.