I've seen a couple of *topic issues lately. What seems strange about the various errors generated in bufpage.c is that they are marked as ERRORs, yet are executed within a critical section causing the system to PANIC.
There are a number of sanity checks that are made prior to any changes taking place, so they need not generate PANICs. *topic is one such error message but there are others. There is no need to take down the whole server just because one block has a corruption. I'm not advocating that corruptions are acceptable, but the server provides no way to remove the corruption, which is a problem and server really should keep a better grip on its towel in any case. I would much prefer: * VACUUMs seeing these errors would perform as with zero_damaged_pages. * other backends seeing those errors should just ERROR out. We can do this by having a new function: boolean PageIsValid() which performs the sanity checks. This can then be executed by heap_page_prune() prior to entering the critical section. That will then be called correctly by both VACUUM and other code. VACUUM can then optionally zero out the block, as is done with PageHeaderIsValid(). Votes? -- Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
