Re: Online enabling of checksums

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 5:06 PM, Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
wrote:

> On 03/03/2018 01:38 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 7:32 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 6:26 PM, Tomas Vondra
> >> <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> >>> Hmmm, OK. So we need to have a valid checksum on a page, disable
> >>> checksums, set some hint bits on the page (which won't be
> >>> WAL-logged), enable checksums again and still get a valid
> >>> checksum even with the new hint bits? That's possible, albeit
> >>> unlikely.
> >>
> >> No, the problem is if - as is much more likely - the checksum is
> >> not still valid.
> >
> > Hmm, on second thought ... maybe I didn't think this through
> > carefully enough. If the checksum matches on the master by chance,
> > and the page is the same on the standby, then we're fine, right? It's
> > a weird accident, but nothing is actually broken. The failure
> > scenario is where the standby has a version of the page with a bad
> > checksum, but the master has a good checksum. So for example:
> > checksums disabled, master modifies the page (which is replicated),
> > master sets some hint bits (coincidentally making the checksum
> > match), now we try to turn checksums on and don't re-replicate the
> > page because the checksum already looks correct.
> >
>
> Yeah. Doesn't that pretty much mean we can't skip any pages that have
> correct checksum, because we can't rely on standby having the same page
> data? That is, this block in ProcessSingleRelationFork:
>
>   /*
>    * If checksum was not set or was invalid, mark the buffer as dirty
>    * and force a full page write. If the checksum was already valid, we
>    * can leave it since we know that any other process writing the
>    * buffer will update the checksum.
>    */
>   if (checksum != pagehdr->pd_checksum)
>   {
>       START_CRIT_SECTION();
>       MarkBufferDirty(buf);
>       log_newpage_buffer(buf, false);
>       END_CRIT_SECTION();
>   }
>
> That would mean this optimization - only doing the write when the
> checksum does not match - is broken.
>

Yes. I think that was the conclusion of this, as posted in
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CABUevExDZu__5KweT8fr3Ox45YcuvTDEEu%3DaDpGBT8Sk0RQE_g%40mail.gmail.com
:)


If that's the case, it probably makes restarts/resume more expensive,
> because this optimization was why after restart the already processed
> data was only read (and the checksums verified) but not written.
>
>
Yes, it definitely does. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's certainly a bit
painful not to be able to resume as cheap.


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 Magnus Hagander
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