Thread

Re: Porting to Native WindowsNT/2000

Henshall, Stuart - WCP <shenshall@westcountrypublications.co.uk> — 2001-09-03T09:03:55Z

> "Dwayne Miller" <dmiller@espgroup.net> writes:
> 
> > Well,  for one.... I have no idea what cygwin is, or what it does to
> > your system, or what security vulnerabilities it might add to your
> > system.  It comes with alot of stuff that I may or may not need,  but
> > what components I need to run Postgres is not clear.
> 
> Cygwin is a Unix environment for Windows.  For information, see
>     http://cygwin.com/
> 
> Cygwin comes with a lot of stuff which you don't need to run Postgres.
> Simply having that stuff on your computer will not introduce any
> security vulnerabilities if you don't run the programs.  Cygwin is
> simply a DLL and a bunch of Unix programs.  It has no server
> component.
> 
> In order to build Postgres, you will need the compiler and associated
> tools.  In order to run all the Postgres commands, you will need the
> shell and several of the tools.
> 
> In fact, I believe that a cygwin distribution actually comes with
> Postgres prebuilt and ready to run.
> 
> (To be honest, the idea of worrying about security vulnerabilities on
> Windows seems odd to me.  If you are honestly worried about security
> on your database server, the first step is to stop running Windows.)
> 
> > Two.... could Postgres be made more efficient on Windows if it ran
> > without cygwin?
> 
> Yes.  Cygwin adds measurable overhead to all I/O operations, and
> obviously a database does a lot of I/O.  Postgres employs operations
> which are fast on Unix but are very slow on cygwin, such as fork.
> 
> As mlw said, porting Postgres to run natively on Windows would be a
> significant effort.  The forking mechanism it uses currently would
> have to be completely rearchitected.  The buffer, file manager, and
> networking code would have to be rewritten.  Off the top of my head,
> for a top programmer who is an expert in Unix, Windows, and Postgres,
> it might take a year.  There would also be a heavy ongoing maintenance
> cost to keep up with new Postgres releases.
> 
> > Three.... can you start cygwin programs on startup of the system?
> 
> Sure.  cygwin programs are just Windows programs which use a
> particular DLL.
> 
> Ian
> 
Cygrunsrv allows postgresql to be run as a service. There's a slight hiccup
on shutdown meaning that the postmaster.pid file gets left. This is due to
sighup being sent by windows shutdown. I think current cygwin snapshots
might cure this, otherwise there is a patch some where that causes SIGHUP to
be ignored. I *think* the pre-built binary already has this patch applied.

- Stuart