Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

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

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>
Cc: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Amul Sul <sulamul@gmail.com>, Zsolt Parragi <zsolt.parragi@percona.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>, Anthonin Bonnefoy <anthonin.bonnefoy@datadoghq.com>, Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com>, Jakub Wartak <jakub.wartak@enterprisedb.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-04-02T19:15:36Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
I wrote:
> Interestingly, pg_verifybackup's t/003_corruption.pl test also fails
> with the same issue, so apparently this platform is even more
> aggressive about sparse-ifying files than Thomas' FreeBSD box.
> I wonder how come we managed to pass that test case before on
> these machines.

The answer to that seems to be that the test scripts for
pg_verifybackup simply fail to detect when it's mishandling
sparse tar entries.  We only check failing cases not successful
cases, and in each case the error checked for is independent of
whether we would have extracted WAL data correctly.  Grumble.

			regards, tom lane



Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Use size_t instead of Size in pg_waldump

  2. More tar portability adjustments.

  3. Further harden tests that might use not-so-compatible tar versions.

  4. Harden astreamer tar parsing logic against archives it can't handle.

  5. Fix pg_waldump/t/001_basic.pl with BSD tar on ZFS.

  6. Remove a low-value, high-risk optimization in pg_waldump.

  7. Fix misuse of simplehash.h hash operations in pg_waldump.

  8. Fix file descriptor leakages in pg_waldump.

  9. Fix poorly-sized buffers in astreamer compression modules.

  10. Remove read_archive_file()'s "count" parameter.

  11. Report detailed errors from XLogFindNextRecord() failures.

  12. Fix assorted bugs in archive_waldump.c.

  13. Remove nonfunctional tar file trailer size check.

  14. Fix finalization of decompressor astreamers.

  15. Move tar detection and compression logic to common.

  16. pg_verifybackup: Enable WAL parsing for tar-format backups

  17. pg_waldump: Add support for reading WAL from tar archives

  18. pg_waldump: Preparatory refactoring for tar archive WAL decoding.

  19. pg_waldump: Remove file-level global WalSegSz.

  20. pg_verifybackup: Verify tar-format backups.