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Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>

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From: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Cc: 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: 2026-03-28T22:57:37Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On 3/28/26 23:36, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
>> However ... I do not find any indication in the GNU tar docs
>> that it produces sparse files by default.  It looks like you
>> need to say -S/--sparse to make that happen.  Maybe you have
>> a version that's been hacked to make that the default?
> 
> Bleah.  Digging in the man pages at freebsd.org, I read
> 
>     --read-sparse
> 	       (c, r, u	modes only) Read sparse	file  information  from	 disk.
> 	       This  is	the reverse of --no-read-sparse	and the	default	behav-
> 	       ior.
> 
> It's apparently been there and been default since FreeBSD 13.1.
> This leads one to wonder how come BF member dikkop is managing
> to run this test successfully.  I speculate that it's using a
> filesystem type that doesn't do sparse files (cc'ing Vondra
> for confirmation on that).
> 

It's running on ufs. But I think the explanation is very simple. We had
a short power outage on Thursday, and the FreeBSD machine failed to boot
properly after the power was restored. IIUC this test is new, right?

I fixed the machine, it'll start running the tests in a couple minutes.


regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra

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.