Re: Protecting against unexpected zero-pages: proposal

Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com> writes:
> .) The basic idea is to have a magic number in every PageHeader before it is
> written to disk, and check for this magic number when performing page
> validity
> checks.

Um ... and exactly how does that differ from the existing behavior?

> .) To avoid adding a new field to PageHeader, and any code breakage, we
> reuse
>    an existing member of the structure.

The amount of fragility introduced by the assumptions you have to make
for this seems to me to be vastly riskier than the risk you are trying
to respond to.
        regards, tom lane