Horton
Menu

Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>

View thread
From: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>, 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: 2026-04-02T00:16:17Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 7:25 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Also, if we are admitting the possibility that what we are reading
> was made by a platform-supplied tar and not our own code, I think
> it verges on lunacy to behave as though unsupported typeflags are
> regular files.

Yeah, if this is the first time we parse files we didn't make then
that makes total sense.  I was a bit unsure of that question when I
suggested we reject pax only after we've failed to find a file, in
case there are scenarios that work today with harmless ignorable pax
headers that don't change the file name.

> So I think we need something more or less like the attached.

LGTM.  Tested with both tars here.  I updated that little test patch
for this.  Not sure if you think it's worth a test though, now that
it's so simple.

@Andrew: I tried using File::Spec->devnull() this time.  Are you able
to check if this works OK on Windows, applied on top of Tom's patch?
AFAIK should be able to run this new test and pass, not skip it.  But
it could be that the shell invocation needs tweaking.  It's hard to
tell from CI.  (Huh, apparently Windows ships a copy of BSD tar as
C:\Windows\System32\tar.exe these days.)

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.