A few bugs have been reported over the years on Alpine with musl libc and generally it has been possible to figure them out without testing on that platform but a few newer ones cannot be reproduced elsewhere.
Also, testing with additional libc implementations helps portability so it makes sense to add support.
For the most part musl libc works as expected with a few caveats:
1) The FD_*() macros won't accept an int file descriptor without warning when -Wsign-conversion is enabled. I opened https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2025/05/23/4 to discuss this and I was referred to https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2024/07/16/1 which explains why this happens. It was not a very satisfying answer but clearly it is not going to be addressed so a meson probe was added to detect the issue and disable the warning.
2) Floating point numbers are rounded differently than in GNU/Mac libc when formatted with printf() and friends. This is fine for the core code but causes issues in the unit tests that expect log entries to match exactly. This was solved in ad7ba46b by adding our own rough and ready formatting routines.
3) Some error messages are different from GNU/Mac libc. This was solved with a new error macro that accepts multiple messages in b5fbb16c.
4) For some reason ninja on Alpine outputs "nothing to do" messages to stderr whereas they go to stdout on other distributions. Redirecting stderr to stdout is our standard fix for this issue so do that. A non-zero result code will let us know that something has gone wrong.
5) It appears that profiling is not supported on Alpine, which is pretty surprising. For now fix this by only unit testing the profiling code when coverage is enabled. This is not a great solution since we would rather test profiling on any system that supports it but for now this will do.
This aligns with what is reported by 'uname -m' and required by Docker naming conventions.
Also convert a 'aarch64' string to the VM_ARCH_AARCH64 constant.
The Github action we were using for multi-architecture testing stopped working. The project does not seem to be getting regular maintenance so it seems better to roll multi-architecture testing into our existing container builds.
Introduce multi-architecture builds and testing into our test framework. For now this only works for unit tests -- integration tests will still only run on x86_64. That could be updated in the future but since emulation is so slow it is not clear if it would be useful.
Also fix an invalid 32-bit checksum. The d11 test had not been running as 32-bit since d8ff89a so the checksum was not updated when it should have been in 48f511d.
Per our policy to support five EOL versions of PostgreSQL, 9.4 is no longer supported by pgBackRest. Remove all logic associated with 9.4 and update the tests.
This includes a small fix in infoPg.c to allow backup.info files with old versions to be saved. This allows expire to function when old versions are present. Even though those older versions cannot be used, they can be expired.
Tests for 9.4 are left in the expire/info tests to demonstrate that these commands work with old versions present.
Ubuntu 20.04 has been having consistent errors starting PostgreSQL 10 so move 9.5 to this container instead. An older version makes sense with an older distro.
Also move PostgreSQL 12 from RHEL 8 since this version will be EOL soon.
Typically we use the oldest Debian/Ubuntu to run 32-bit unit and integration tests. However, 32-bit is no longer fully supported by Ubuntu (multiple packages we need are missing) and apt.postgresql.org no longer packages for any 32-bit version.
To address these changes, do 64-bit integration testing on the oldest Debian/Ubuntu (currently Ubuntu 20.04) and 32-bit unit/integration testing on the oldest Debian (currently 11) using the included version for integration testing.
lcov does not seem to be very well maintained and is often not compatible with the version of gcc it ships with until a few months after a new distro is released. In any case, lcov is that not useful for us because it generates reports on all coverage while we are mainly interested in missing coverage during development.
Instead use the JSON output generated by gcov to generate our minimal coverage report and metrics for the documentation.
There are some slight differences in the metrics. The difference in the common module was due to a bug in the old code -- build/common was being added into common as well as being reported separately. The source of the two additional branches in the backup module is unknown but almost certainly down to how exclusions are processed with regular expressions. Since there is additional coverage rather than coverage missing this seems fine.
Since this was pretty much a rewrite it was also a good time to migrate to C.
This should have been done in 434938e3 but somehow it didn't happen.
Fedora 38 requires 2048 bit keys so update the VM builds to use them. Update the documentation to use 2048 bit keys. This is not technically required by this commit but it makes sense to do it now.
Also update the key location for the yum.p.o repository.
Lastly, shuffle test PostgreSQL versions since PostgreSQL 11 is not longer available in the yum.p.o repository.
Per our policy to support five EOL versions of PostgreSQL, 9.3 is no longer supported by pgBackRest.
Remove all logic associated with 9.3 and update the tests.
Double spaces have fallen out of favor in recent years because they no longer contribute to readability.
We have been using single spaces and editing related paragraphs for some time, but now it seems best to update the remaining instances to avoid churn in unrelated commits and to make it clearer what spacing contributors should use.
Ubuntu 18.04 will be EOL before the next release, so update to the oldest available Debian version.
Also fix one incorrect return value type, a test cast, and adjust some test timeouts.
The libbacktrace feature has not been working since the move to meson because libbacktrace detection was not added to the meson build. Add libbacktrace to meson and improve the feature so that it can be compiled into release builds.
The prior implementation fetched line numbers with each stack trace push. Not only was this slow but it missed any functions that were not being tracked on our stack.
Instead just examine the backtrace when an error happens and merge it with the info we have on our stack. If the backtrace is not available then the output remains as before.
Also remove --backtrace from test.pl since the library is now auto-detected.
Leave this library out of the production build for now to give it a little time to shake out in testing.
Our new policy is to support ten versions of PostgreSQL, the five supported releases and the last five EOL releases. As of PostgreSQL 15, that means 9.0/9.1/9.2 are no longer supported by pgBackRest.
Remove all logic associated with 9.0/9.1/9.2 and update the tests.
Document the new support policy.
Update InfoPg to read/write control versions for the history in backup.info, since we can no longer rely on the mappings being available. In theory this could have been an issue after removing 8.3/8.4 if anybody was using a version that old.
The option to specify the path to psql was shown in the command-line help as --psql-bin but the option was actually named --pgsql-bin.
Rename to match the help so they are consistent.
Both have newer gcc and OpenSSL 3.
Fedora 36 runs horribly slow with valgrind enabled so run the valgrind tests on Ubuntu 22.04. Fedora 36 has a newer gcc so it is still worth testing on.
Remove VM_OS_REPO since it is no longer required.
Rebalance PostgreSQL versions for more efficient test times.
Always print version of PostgreSQL when testing. This helps verify that new minor releases are being used.
Integration expect log testing was originally used as a rough-and-ready way to make sure that certain code paths were being executed before the unit tests existed. Now that we have 100% unit test coverage (with expect log testing) the value of the integration expect tests seems minimal at best.
But they do cause numerous issues:
- Maintenance of the expect code and replacements that are required to keep logs reproducible.
- Even a trivial change can cause massive churn in the expect logs, e.g. d9088b2. These changes should be minutely audited but since the expect logs have little value now it is seldom worth the effort.
- The OS version used to do expect testing (RHEL7) can only be used to test one version of PostgreSQL. This makes it hard to balance the PostgreSQL version testing between OS versions.
- When a commit affects expect logs it is not clear (especially for new developers) how to regenerate them and our contributing guide is silent on the issue.
The goal is to migrate the integration tests to C and expect testing is not part of that plan. It seems best to get rid of them now.
This helps rebalance some of the tests that are running long, i.e. d9 and u20.
I would be better to move more PostgreSQL versions to d9, but the base VM does not contain more versions. New minor versions will be out later in the week so that seems a better time to be rebuilding containers.
PostgreSQL 15 drops support for exclusive backup and renames the start/stop backup commands.
This is based on the pgdg-testing repo since beta1 has not been released yet, but it seems unlikely that breaking changes will be made at this point. beta1 should be tagged just before our next release so we'll retest before the release.
The /etc/profile.d/lang.sh script was causing issues but it does not exist on amd64, so it seems the easiest thing was to remove it.
Fix how 32-bit VMs are determined now that another 64-bit architecture has been added.
And remove some obsolete VM hashes.
There is no evidence that users need 8.3/8.4 anymore but it does cost us in terms of development and testing, especially now that we have a number of new backup/restore features planned.
It seems to make sense to remove this support now. If there are users who need to use/migrate from these versions they can use an older version of pgBackRest.
Since CentOS 8 will be EOL at the end of the year it makes sense to do this now. The centos:8 image is still used in documentation.xml because changes there require manual testing, which will need to be done at a later date. The changes are not user-facing, however, and can be done at any time.
Also update CentOS references to RHEL since that is what we are emulating for testing purposes.
Update Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04. Version 16.04 is recently EOL but testing on an old version is beneficial.
Update Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.
Update Fedora 32 to 33. Version 34 would have been preferred but there were some build issues, i.e. the default shell did not work with configure, and after ksh was installed configure locked up.
Add --no-install-recommends to apt-get commands to save a bit of time and space.
Update test Dockerfile to run in multiple steps. This makes the container larger but also makes rebuilding after changes faster. The --squash option may be used to keep the container small.
Remove obsolete casts in protocol/parallel module. These casts were included in the original migration because Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit gcc required them, but Ubuntu 16.04 32-bit gcc complains. There is no production issue here since at this point in the code the file descriptors are guaranteed to be >= 0.
There are no code changes from PostgreSQL 13 so simply add the new version.
Add CATALOG_VERSION_NO_MAX to allow the catalog version to "float" during the PostgreSQL beta/rc period so new pgBackRest versions are not required when the catalog version changes.
Update the integration tests to handle new PostgreSQL startup messages.
The tests worked fine on multiple architectures, but would only run "bare metal", i.e. tests that required containers could not be run.
Enable basic multi-architecture support by allowing containers to be built using whatever architecture the host supports. Also allow cached containers to be defined for multiple architectures in container.yaml.
Add a Dockerfile which can be used as a container for other containers to provide a consistent development environment.
The primary goal is to allow development on Mac M1 but other architectures should find these improvements useful.
Testing on Travis-CI has been getting slower (from ~18 minutes to 3-6 hours) and the travis-ci.org service will be terminated at the end of the year. Moving to travis-ci.com is an option but the quotas are too low for our purposes.
Instead use Github Actions, which does not currently have quotas, and runs our current tests with just a few tweaks.
This still leaves multi-architecture tests on Travis-CI but we may be able to run those and stay within the new quotas.
Also fix a minor bug in restoreTest.c exposed by Github Actions using a different name for the user and group.
Update RHEL/CentOS 7 to cover the versions that were previously covered by RHEL/CentOS 6.
Since RHEL/CentOS 7/8 work the same update the documentation logic and labels to reflect this compatibility.
CentOS6 EOL'd and the mirrors were swiftly deleted, leading to failures in tests and documentation.
Remove CentOS 6 for now to get builds going again with the intention to replace it in the near future with CentOS 8.
Add older PostgreSQL versions to the u18 container that were not available before.
This also updates all minor versions for prior versions of PostgreSQL.
There don't appear to be any behavioral changes since PostgreSQL 12 and all the tests pass.
Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.