In pursuit of knowledge about clock_gettime(), I installed FreeBSD 10.3 on a PowerBook I had laying about. I was disappointed to find out that HEAD fails regression tests on that platform:
*** /usr/home/tgl/pgsql/src/test/regress/expected/lock.out Thu Dec 29 19:37:50 2016 --- /usr/home/tgl/pgsql/src/test/regress/results/lock.out Fri Dec 30 00:31:01 2016 *************** *** 63,70 **** -- atomic ops tests RESET search_path; SELECT test_atomic_ops(); ! test_atomic_ops ! ----------------- ! t ! (1 row) ! --- 63,66 ---- -- atomic ops tests RESET search_path; SELECT test_atomic_ops(); ! ERROR: flag: set spuriously #2 ====================================================================== After some digging I found out that the atomics code appears to believe that the PPC platform has byte-wide atomics, which of course is nonsense. That causes it to define pg_atomic_flag with the "char" variant, and what we end up with is word-wide operations (lwarx and friends) operating on a byte-wide struct. Failure is not exactly astonishing; what's surprising is that we don't get stack-clobber core dumps or such. Undef'ing HAVE_GCC__SYNC_CHAR_TAS makes it work. Perhaps it could be argued that there's a FreeBSD compiler bug here, but what I'm wondering is why configure believes that this: [char lock = 0; __sync_lock_test_and_set(&lock, 1); __sync_lock_release(&lock);])], is going to draw a hard error on platforms without byte-wide atomics. My sense of C semantics is that the best you could hope for is a warning --- and a look at the config.log on this platform says we're not even getting that. In short, I'd put the blame here on a ridiculously optimistic configure check. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers