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Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>

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From: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, 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: 2026-03-29T13:33:10Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 

On 3/29/26 00:12, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me> writes:
>> On 3/28/26 23:36, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> It's apparently been there and been default since FreeBSD 13.1.
>>> This leads one to wonder how come BF member dikkop is managing
>>> to run this test successfully.  I speculate that it's using a
>>> filesystem type that doesn't do sparse files (cc'ing Vondra
>>> for confirmation on that).
> 
>> It's running on ufs. But I think the explanation is very simple. We had
>> a short power outage on Thursday, and the FreeBSD machine failed to boot
>> properly after the power was restored. IIUC this test is new, right?
> 
> Not that new, it dates to b15c15139, about a week ago.
> 
> 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.

regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra

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.