From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Cc: Mark Dilger <mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: new heapcheck contrib module
Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 15:50:52 -0400
Message-ID: <13718.1589485852@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200514193140.GA19814@alvherre.pgsql>
References: <20200514193140.GA19814@alvherre.pgsql>
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> On 2020-May-14, Robert Haas wrote:
>> If you mean that we shouldn't have the buildfarm run the proposed heap
>> corruption checker against heap pages full of randomly-generated
>> garbage, I tend to agree. Such a test wouldn't be very stable and
>> might fail in lots of low-probability ways that could require
>> unreasonable effort to find and fix.
> This is what I meant. I was thinking of blocks generated randomly.
Yeah, -1 for using random data --- when it fails, how you gonna
reproduce the problem?
>> If you mean that we shouldn't have the buildfarm run the proposed heap
>> corruption checker against any corrupted heap pages at all, I tend to
>> disagree.
> Yeah, IMV those would not be arbitrarily corrupted -- instead they're
> crafted to be corrupted in some specific way.
I think there's definitely value in corrupting data in some predictable
(reproducible) way and verifying that the check code catches it and
responds as expected. Sure, this will not be 100% coverage, but it'll be
a lot better than 0% coverage.
regards, tom lane
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To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, alvherre@2ndquadrant.com, robertmhaas@gmail.com, pg@bowt.ie, mark.dilger@enterprisedb.com, andres@anarazel.de
Subject: Re: new heapcheck contrib module
In-Reply-To: <13718.1589485852@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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