Thread

Re: RFC: PostgreSQL Storage I/O Transformation Hooks

Zsolt Parragi <zsolt.parragi@percona.com> — 2025-12-29T07:37:37Z

> The main difference is timing and current availability:
>
> - The hook approach is working today and can be used immediately
. - Your SMGR extensibility work provides a more comprehensive
long-term solution

I disagree with this. The SMGR patch is available since 2023/PG16 as a
patch, and it is already used by at least 3 companies I know of (Neon,
Nile, Percona), and probably also by others I don't know of. It is
available immediately.

Compared to that this proposal is something new, and more limited.

The actual advantage of this proposal is that it includes WAL, but I
still think the two should be separate discussions.

> Regarding what to protect (WAL vs heap vs both), there's flexibility depending on the organization and jurisdiction. The hook approach allows extensions to choose - you can implement only the buffer hooks if that satisfies your requirements, or add WAL hooks if needed.

My concern is that these two separate discussion about 2 extensibility
points, with different concerns by different people. One part
shouldn't stall the other, as for some, even getting half of it into
the core for PG19 would be useful.

> You're absolutely right that extension developers need to understand multiprocess architecture, memory management, critical sections, and so on.

> This is precisely why test_tde exists as a reference implementation.

The reference implementation ignores the tricky steps, like key
rotation, caching, configuration, providing a user interface, etc,
which all require knowledge of postgres internals.

> ARIA and SEED are already implemented in OpenSSL. However, Korean law requires certified implementations. Specifically, companies must use nationally-certified builds and provide the hash codes of those specific library binaries to regulators. You cannot simply use the OpenSSL version, even if the algorithm is identical.

That could be still solved by introducing an abstraction layer in the
encryption code of a TDE extension :) Encryption is only a small part
of an extension, the other parts (user interface, rotation, key
storage integrations, etc) are a much bigger part. It is still
questionable to reimplement everything because of an encryption
library difference. But I see your point, that is a bit more
difficult.

> That's a reasonable approach for SMGR-based solutions where you control the storage layer. However, with the hook approach, we don't have the ability to inject custom WAL records for encryption events.

> Currently, in a replication environment, the reference implementation requires the same key to be configured in the settings on both primary and replicas (shared key model). For future KMS integration, I'm considering mechanisms to propagate keys to replicas through external channels rather than WAL.

I originally wrote a long answer about how I don't think this is
related to where the hooks are, and then I realized that the problem
is probably completely different - and this also shows why adding a
few bits to the pages is not a good generic solution for all
extensions.

Our extension uses a 2 level key architecture, as used by most
database servers (there's a master key, and it encodes separate
internal keys, one for each database file). The proposed sample code
in your patch uses a single key, with the IV encoding the database
file. That means you want to encode which key is used for each page
instead of for each file.

So we approach how we map data/pages to keys completely differently.
But I don't think the page header addition is a good solution, because
it is specific to your implementation, not for encryption solutions in
general.

(Also, I just noticed that you forgot about timelineid in derive_iv,
you probably want to include that somehow)