Re: 16-bit page checksums for 9.2

On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 04:25:19PM +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 04:01:02PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > > Why don't you use the same tricks as the former patch and copy the buffer,
> > > compute the checksum on that, and then write out that copy (you can even do
> > > both at the same time). I have a hard time believing that the additional copy
> > > is more expensive than the locking.
> > 
> > ISTM we can't write and copy at the same time because the cheksum is
> > not a trailer field.
> 
> Ofcourse you can. If the checksum is in the trailer field you get the
> nice property that the whole block has a constant checksum. However, if
> you store the checksum elsewhere you just need to change the checking
> algorithm to copy the checksum out, zero those bytes and run the
> checksum and compare with the extracted checksum.
> 
> Not pretty, but I don't think it makes a difference in performence.

Sorry to be late replying to this, but an interesting idea would be to
zero the _hint_ bits before doing the CRC checksum.  That would avoid
the problem of WAL-logging the hint bits.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +