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Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>

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From: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
To: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, 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: 2026-03-29T22:11:50Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 2:33 AM Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me> wrote:
> On 3/29/26 00:12, Tom Lane wrote:
> > I've reproduced Thomas' failure on a local FreeBSD 15.0 image
> > using zfs, and confirmed that this cowboy hack fixes it:
> >
>
> Interesting. Then I guess it has to be due to some difference in ufs vs.
> zfs, when handling sparse files. It might be useful to add a bit more
> variation here, and switch some of the animals to non-default
> filesystems (not just the FreeBSD ones, which we seem to have only two
> that run reasonably often). I'd bet most of the linux systems run on
> ext4/xfs, few on btrfs/zfs.

UFS does have sparse files (its ancestor invented them some time
around (time_t) 0), it just doesn't make them unless you tell it to.
PostgreSQL only does that if you set wal_init_zero=false.

ZFS is different because it creates holes automagically when you write
zeroes, at least if compression is enabled so it has to scan all your
bytes anyway.

I was curious to know if BTRFS does that too, or hides
zero-compression at some lower invisible level:

$ echo "hello" > 1MB-sparse.dat
$ truncate -s 512KB 1MB-sparse.dat
$ echo "world" >> 1MB-sparse.dat
$ truncate -s 1MB 1MB-sparse.dat
$ ls -l 1MB-sparse.dat
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tmunro tmunro 1000000 Mar 30 10:11 1MB-sparse.dat
$ du -hs 1MB-sparse.dat
8.0K    1MB-sparse.dat
$ strace tar -S -cf foo.tar 1MB-sparse.dat 2>&1 | grep seek
lseek(4, 0, SEEK_DATA)                  = 0
lseek(4, 0, SEEK_HOLE)                  = 4096
lseek(4, 4096, SEEK_DATA)               = 512000
lseek(4, 512000, SEEK_HOLE)             = 516096
lseek(4, 516096, SEEK_DATA)             = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address)

... so that's a yes, lseek sees holes that we didn't ask it to make,
just like on ZFS, but the rest of this trace of GNU tar -S -cf is
interesting:

lseek(5, 0, SEEK_SET)                   = 0
lseek(5, 0, SEEK_SET)                   = 0
lseek(4, 0, SEEK_SET)                   = 0
lseek(4, 512000, SEEK_SET)              = 512000
lseek(4, 1000000, SEEK_SET)             = 1000000

It didn't write out PAX format!  Instead it replicated the holes into
the tar file itself with SEEK_SET.

$ strings foo.tar | grep Sparse

You have to add --format=posix to enable the GNU behaviour that BSD
tar is emulating by default:

$ tar --format=posix -S -cf foo.tar 1MB-sparse.dat
$ strings foo.tar | grep Sparse
./GNUSparseFile.4190/1MB-sparse.dat

I expected GNU tar to be forced to do that if writing to non-seekable
output, eg "tar -S -c 1MB-sparse.dat | cat > foo.tar", but somehow it
manages to write out only ~10KB of plain ustar format that it is able
to restore to the full 1MB apparent size using some other trick, but
... ENOTIME, I dunno how it's doing that.  Might be interesting to see
if pg_waldump can read it though, 'cause the bytes aren't all there.

BTW I confirmed that Apple tar does have -S by default too, it's just
that APFS doesn't make holes magically, so this test would presumably
have broken on a Mac if wal_init_zero had been forced to zero (not
tested).

Anyway, given the defaults, GNU tar + ZFS/BTRFS users must be pretty
unlikely to hit this in the wild, and the symptom is a confusing error
in a maintenance tool, not corruption, so I don't think this is a big
deal.  I might still try teaching the astreamer code to understand PAX
1.0 when it sees it in the next cycle though, for the benefit of
FreeBSD users.  A quick and dirty version could probably just unmangle
the name and skip the first block of data, since any valid WAL file
will not begin with a hole and valid WAL data will end at the first
hole and fail our verification, but of course a real implementation
should read the map properly[1]...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/PAX-1.html

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.