For the most part this is a direct migration of the Perl code into C except as noted below.
A backup can now be initiated from a linked directory. The link will not be stored in the manifest or recreated on restore. If a link or directory does not already exist in the restore location then a directory will be created.
The logic for creating backup labels has been improved and it should no longer be possible to get a backup label earlier than the latest backup even with timezone changes or clock skew. This has never been an issue in the field that we know of, but we found it in testing.
For online backups all times are fetched from the PostgreSQL primary host (before only copy start was). This doesn't affect backup integrity but it does prevent clock skew between hosts affecting backup duration reporting.
Archive copy now works as expected when the archive and backup have different compression settings, i.e. when one is compressed and the other is not. This was a long-standing bug in the Perl code.
Resume will now work even if hardlink settings have been changed.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
This new implementation should behave exactly like the old Perl code with the exception of updated log messages.
Remove as much of the Perl code as possible without breaking other commands.
When this error happens in the context of a backup it can be a bit mystifying as to why the backup is failing. Add some hints to get the user started.
These hints will appear any time a WAL segment can't be found, which makes the hint about the check command redundant when the user is actually running the check command, but it doesn't seem worth trying to exclude the hint in that case.
Suggested by Hans-Jürgen Schönig.
Multiple status files were being created by asynchronous archiving if a high-level error occurred after one or more WAL segments had already been transferred successfully. Error files were being written for every file in the queue regardless of whether it had already succeeded. To fix this, add an option to skip writing error files when an ok file already exists.
There are other situations where both files might exist (various fsync and filesystem error scenarios) so it seems best to retry in the case that multiple status files are found rather than throwing a hard error (which then means that archiving is completely stuck). In the case of multiple status files, a warning will be logged to alert the user that something unusual is happening and the command will be retried.
Reported by fpa-postgres, Joe Ayers, Douglas J Hunley.
PostgreSQL 11 introduces configurable WAL segment sizes, from 1MB to 1GB.
There are two areas that needed to be updated to support this: building the archive-get queue and checking that WAL has been archived after a backup. Both operations require the WAL segment size to properly build a list.
Checking the archive after a backup is still implemented in Perl and has an active database connection, so just get the WAL segment size from the database.
The archive-get command does not have a connection to the database, so get the WAL segment size from pg_control instead. This requires a deeper inspection of pg_control than has been done in the past, so it seemed best to copy the relevant data structures from each version of PostgreSQL and build a generic interface layer to address them. While this approach is a bit verbose, it has the advantage of being relatively simple, and can easily be updated for new versions of PostgreSQL.
Since the integration tests generate pg_control files for testing, teach Perl how to generate files with the correct offsets for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.