Re: bad posix_fadvise support causes initdb to exit ungracefully

2011/6/15 PostgreSQL - Hans-Jürgen Schönig <postgres@cybertec.at>:
> hello ...
>
> 2.4? we know that some versions of 2.4 cause problems due to broken posix_fadvise. if i remember correctly we built
someconfigure magic into PostgreSQL to check for this bug. what does this check do? 

It doesn't check anything beyond looking for stanard defines --
posix_fadvise is there but fails immediately with ENOSYS despite what
the lying manpage says.

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Things brings up a couple of questions:
>> *) Are linuxes this old out of support?
>
> RHEL3 is just about dead as far as Red Hat is concerned: only critical
> security bugs will be addressed, and even that is going to stop in a
> year or two.  RH would certainly not recommend that you be trying to
> put any new applications on that platform.
>
>> *) Should configure be testing for working posix_fadvise?
>
> There isn't any reliable way to do that at configure time, I think.
> We could add an AC_TRY_RUN call but it wouldn't be trustworthy; think
> cross-compiles, or running on some other kernel version than where you
> compiled.  Unless the problem manifests on some not-quite-so-dead
> platform, I'm not in favor of it.

fair enough.  anyways, at least it's documented if someone else bumps
into this...

merlin