Re: silent data loss with ext4 / all current versions

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 9:41 PM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 8:26 AM, Tomas Vondra
> <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> On 01/22/2016 06:45 AM, Michael Paquier wrote:
>>
>>> So, I have been playing with a Linux VM with VMware Fusion and on
>>> ext4 with data=ordered the renames are getting lost if the root
>>> folder is not fsync. By killing-9 the VM I am able to reproduce that
>>> really easily.
>>
>>
>> Yep. Same experience here (with qemu-kvm VMs).
>
> I still think a better approach for this is to run the database on an
> LVM volume and take lots of snapshots. No VM needed, though it doesn't
> hurt. LVM volumes are below the level of the filesystem and a snapshot
> captures the state of the raw blocks the filesystem has written to the
> block layer. The block layer does no caching though the drive may but
> neither the VM solution nor LVM would capture that.
>
> LVM snapshots would have the advantage that you can keep running the
> database and you can take lots of snapshots with relatively little
> overhead. Having dozens or hundreds of snapshots would be unacceptable
> performance drain in production but for testing it should be practical
> and they take relatively little space -- just the blocks changed since
> the snapshot was taken.

Another idea: hardcode a PANIC just after rename() with
restart_after_crash = off (this needs is IsBootstrapProcess() checks).
Once server crashes, kill-9 the VM. Then restart the VM and the
Postgres instance with a new binary that does not have the PANIC, and
see how things are moving on. There is a window of up to several
seconds after the rename() call, so I guess that this would work.
-- 
Michael