Re: Online enabling of checksums

Hi,

On 2018-04-05 23:32:19 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 11:23 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > Is there any sort of locking that guarantees that worker processes see
> > an up2date value of
> > DataChecksumsNeedWrite()/ControlFile->data_checksum_version? Afaict
> > there's not. So you can afaict end up with checksums being computed by
> > the worker, but concurrent writes missing them.  The window is going to
> > be at most one missed checksum per process (as the unlocking of the page
> > is a barrier) and is probably not easy to hit, but that's dangerous
> > enough.
> >
>
> So just to be clear of the case you're worried about. It's basically:
> Session #1 - sets checksums to inprogress
> Session #1 - starts dynamic background worker ("launcher")
> Launcher reads and enumerates pg_database
> Launcher starts worker in first database
> Worker processes first block of data in database
> And at this point, Session #2 has still not seen the "checksums inprogress"
> flag and continues to write without checksums?

Yes.  I think there are some variations of that, but yes, that's pretty
much it.


> That seems like quite a long time to me -- is that really a problem?

We don't generally build locking models that are only correct based on
likelihood. Especially not without a lengthy comment explaining that
analysis.