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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: Sami Imseih <samimseih@gmail.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, 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: 2026-04-03T00:07:40Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

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On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 12:43 PM Sami Imseih <samimseih@gmail.com> wrote:
> The --format=ustar has a limit of 2^21 (2097151) for UID/GID [1]
> and on my machine the UID is 10012663.
>
> So I found that one way to deal with this is to run the tar command with
> --owner=0 --group=0. As far as I can tell, the owner and group IDs don't
> matter for these tests, so maybe that is OK.
>
> @@ -1333,6 +1333,10 @@ sub tar_portability_options
>                 == 0)
>         {
>                 push(@tar_p_flags, "--format=ustar");
> +               # ustar format supports UIDs only up to 2^21 (2097151).
> +               # Override owner/group to avoid failures on systems where
> +               # the running user's UID/GID exceeds that limit.
> +               push(@tar_p_flags, "--owner=0", "--group=0");

Interesting.  BSD tar accepts those too, so here's an update to my
previous patch.

> While this fixes the test, I am now not sure what the broader implications are
> for --format=ustar for pg_waldump in the broader discussion?

I think users who have their own tar scripts will mostly be
unaffected, but a small minority will see the new error if they try to
use pg_verifybackup or pg_waldump, and they'll find their way to
--format=ustar, and then they might see the UID/GID error in their own
.tar production scripts, and find their way to adding those switches
too.  Seems OK?  Especially with a documentation note once we've
settle all of this.

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.