Bug Fixes:
* Fix missing files corrupting the manifest. If a file was removed by PostgreSQL during the backup (or was missing from the standby) then the next file might not be copied and updated in the manifest. If this happened then the backup would error when restored. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Vitaliy Kukharik.)
Improvements:
* Use pkg-config instead of xml2-config for libxml2 build options. (Contributed by David Steele, Adrian Vondendriesch.)
* Validate checksums are set in the manifest on backup/restore. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Bug Fixes:
* Fix error in timeline conversion. The timeline is required to verify WAL segments in the archive after a backup. The conversion was performed base 10 instead of 16, which led to errors when the timeline was ≥ 0xA. (Reported by Lukas Ertl, Eric Veldhuyzen.)
Bug Fixes:
* Fix options being ignored by asynchronous commands. The asynchronous archive-get/archive-push processes were not loading options configured in command configuration sections, e.g. [global:archive-get]. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Urs Kramer.)
* Fix handling of \ in filenames. \ was not being properly escaped when calculating the manifest checksum which prevented the manifest from loading. Since instances of \ in cluster filenames should be rare to nonexistent this does not seem likely to be a serious problem in the field.
Features:
* pgBackRest is now pure C.
* Add pg-user option. Specifies the database user name when connecting to PostgreSQL. If not specified pgBackRest will connect with the local OS user or PGUSER, which was the previous behavior. (Contributed by Mike Palmiotto.)
* Allow path-style URIs in S3 driver.
Improvements:
* The backup command is implemented entirely in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
The local, remote, archive-get-async, and archive-push-async commands were used to run functionality that was not directly available to the user. Unfortunately that meant they would not pick up options from the command that the user expected, e.g. backup, archive-get, etc.
Remove the internal commands and add roles which allow pgBackRest to determine what functionality is required without implementing special commands. This way the options are loaded from the expected command section.
Since remote is no longer a specific command with its own options, more manipulation is required when calling remote. This might be something we can improve in the config system but it may be worth leaving as is because it is a one-off, for now at least.
Although path-style URIs have been deprecated by AWS, they may still be used with products like Minio because no additional DNS configuration is required.
Path-style URIs must be explicitly enabled since it is not clear how they can be auto-detected reliably. More importantly, faulty detection could cause regressions in current installations.
This option was overloaded on the general type option but it makes sense to split this out since the meaning is pretty different.
Rename the values to conform to current standards, i.e. pg and repo, now that the Perl code won't care anymore.
The command option will be removed from the C code so it needs to be removed here as well.
This code is now used only for testing so it's not important that it be so precise.
Specifies the database user name when connecting to PostgreSQL.
If not specified pgBackRest will connect with the local OS user or PGUSER, which was the previous behavior.
Remove embedded Perl from the distributed binary. This includes code, configure, Makefile, and packages. The distributed binary is now pure C.
Remove storagePathEnforceSet() from the C Storage object which allowed Perl to write outside of the storage base directory. Update mock/all and real/all integration tests to use storageLocal() where they were violating this rule.
Remove "c" option that allowed the remote to tell if it was being called from C or Perl.
Code to convert options to JSON for passing to Perl (perl/config.c) has been moved to LibC since it is still required for Perl integration tests.
Update build and installation instructions in the user guide.
Remove all Perl unit tests.
Remove obsolete Perl code. In particular this included all the Perl protocol code which required modifications to the Perl storage, manifest, and db objects that are still required for integration testing but only run locally. Any remaining Perl code is required for testing, documentation, or code generation.
Rename perlReq to binReq in define.yaml to indicate that the binary is required for a test. This had been the actual meaning for quite some time but the key was never renamed.
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.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix archive-push/archive-get when PGDATA is symlinked. These commands tried to use cwd() as PGDATA but this would disagree with the path configured in pgBackRest if PGDATA was symlinked. If cwd() does not match the pgBackRest path then chdir() to the path and make sure the next cwd() matches the result from the first call. (Reported by Stephen Frost, Milosz Suchy.)
* Fix reference list when backup.info is reconstructed in expire command. Since the backup command is still using the Perl version of reconstruct this issue will not express unless 1) there is a backup missing from backup.info and 2) the expire command is run directly instead of running after backup as usual. This unlikely combination of events means this is probably not a problem in the field.
* Fix segfault on unexpected EOF in gzip decompression. (Reported by Stephen Frost.)
82df7e6f and 9856fef5 updated tests that used test points in preparation for the feature not being available in the C code.
Since tests points are no longer used remove the infrastructure.
Also remove one stray --test option in mock/all that was essentially a noop but no longer works now that the option has been removed.
Archive check does not run when in offline backup mode but the option was set to true in the manifest. It's harmless since these options are informational only but it could cause confusion when debugging.
This expression determines which files contain page checksums but it was also including the directory above the relation directories. In a real PostgreSQL installation this not a problem because these directories don't contain any files.
However, our tests place a file in `base` which the Perl code thought should have page checksums while the new C code says no.
Update the expression to document the change and avoid churn in the expect logs later.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix remote timeout in delta restore. When performing a delta restore on a largely unchanged cluster the remote could timeout if no files were fetched from the repository within protocol-timeout. Add keep-alives to prevent remote timeout. (Reported by James Sewell, Jens Wilke.)
* Fix handling of repeated HTTP headers. When HTTP headers are repeated they should be considered equivalent to a single comma-separated header rather than generating an error, which was the prior behavior. (Reported by donicrosby.)
Improvements:
* JSON output from the info command is no longer pretty-printed. Monitoring systems can more easily ingest the JSON without linefeeds. External tools such as jq can be used to pretty-print if desired. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* The check command is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
Documentation Improvements:
* Document how to contribute to pgBackRest. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Document maximum version for auto-stop option. (Contributed by Brad Nicholson.)
Test Suite Improvements:
* Fix container test path being used when --vm=none. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
* Fix mismatched timezone in expect test. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
* Don't autogenerate embedded libc code by default. (Suggested by Stephen Frost.)
Note that building the manifest on each host has been temporarily removed.
This feature will likely be brought back as a non-default option (after the manifest code has been fully migrated to C) since it can be fairly expensive.
Features:
* PostgreSQL 12 support.
* Add info command set option for detailed text output. The additional details include databases that can be used for selective restore and a list of tablespaces and symlinks with their default destinations. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by Stephen Frost, ejberdecia.)
* Add standby restore type. This restore type automatically adds standby_mode=on to recovery.conf for PostgreSQL < 12 and creates standby.signal for PostgreSQL ≥ 12, creating a common interface between PostgreSQL versions. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Improvements:
* The restore command is implemented entirely in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Documentation Improvements:
* Document the relationship between db-timeout and protocol-timeout. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang. Suggested by James Chanco Jr.)
* Add documentation clarifications regarding standby repositories. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Add FAQ for time-based Point-in-Time Recovery. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
Recovery settings are now written into postgresql.auto.conf instead of recovery.conf. Existing recovery_target* settings will be commented out to help avoid conflicts.
A comment is added before recovery settings to identify them as written by pgBackRest since it is unclear how, in general, old settings will be removed.
recovery.signal and standby.signal are automatically created based on the recovery settings.
This restore type automatically adds standby_mode=on to recovery.conf.
This could be accomplished previously by setting --recovery-option=standby_mode=on but PostgreSQL 12 requires standby mode to be enabled by a special file named standby.signal.
The new restore type allows us to maintain a common interface between PostgreSQL versions.
For the most part this is a direct migration of the Perl code into C.
There is one important behavioral change with regard to how file permissions are handled. The Perl code tried to set ownership as it was in the manifest even when running as an unprivileged user. This usually just led to errors and frustration.
The C code works like this:
If a restore is run as a non-root user (the typical scenario) then all files restored will belong to the user/group executing pgBackRest. If existing files are not owned by the executing user/group then an error will result if the ownership cannot be updated to the executing user/group. In that case the file ownership will need to be updated by a privileged user before the restore can be retried.
If a restore is run as the root user then pgBackRest will attempt to recreate the ownership recorded in the manifest when the backup was made. Only user/group names are stored in the manifest so the same names must exist on the restore host for this to work. If the user/group name cannot be found locally then the user/group of the PostgreSQL data directory will be used and finally root if the data directory user/group cannot be mapped to a name.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
These features finally make the ls command practical.
Currently the JSON contains only name, type, and size. We may add more fields in the future, but these seem like the minimum needed to be useful.
Bug Fixes:
* Improve slow manifest build for very large quantities of tables/segments. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
* Fix exclusions for special files. (Reported by CluelessTechnologist, Janis Puris, Rachid Broum.)
Improvements:
* The stanza-create/update/delete commands are implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* The start/stop commands are implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Create log directories/files with 0750/0640 mode. (Suggested by Damiano Albani.)
Documentation Bug Fixes:
* Fix yum.p.o package being installed when custom package specified. (Reported by Joe Ayers, John Harvey.)
Documentation Improvements:
* Build pgBackRest as an unprivileged user. (Suggested by Laurenz Albe.)
Decoding a manifest from the JSON provided by C to the hash required by Perl is an expensive process. If manifest() was called on a remote it was being decoded into a hash and then immediately re-encoded into JSON for transmission over the protocol layer.
Instead, provide a function for the remote to get the raw JSON which can be transmitted as is and decoded in the calling process instead.
This makes remote manifest calls as fast as they were before 2.16, but local calls must still pay the decoding penalty and are therefore slower. This will continue to be true until the Perl storage interface is retired at the end of the C migration.
Note that for reasonable numbers of tables there is no detectable difference. The case in question involved 250K tables with a 10 minute decode time (which was being doubled) on a fast workstation.
Prior to 2.16 the Perl manifest code would skip any file that began with a dot. This was not intentional but it allowed PostgreSQL socket files to be located in the data directory. The new C code in 2.16 did not have this unintentional exclusion so socket files in the data directory caused errors.
Worse, the file type error was being thrown before the exclusion check so there was really no way around the issue except to move the socket files out of the data directory.
Special file types (e.g. socket, pipe) will now be automatically skipped and a warning logged to notify the user of the exclusion. The warning can be suppressed with an explicit --exclude.
Reported by CluelessTechnologist, Janis Puris, Rachid Broum.
Putting the checksum at the beginning of the file made it impossible to stream the file out when saving. The entire file had to be held in memory while it was checksummed so the checksum could be written at the beginning.
Instead place the checksum at the end. This does not break the existing Perl or C code since the read is not order dependent.
There are no plans to improve the Perl code to take advantage of this change, but it will make the C implementation more efficient.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
The log directories/files were being created with a mix of modes depending on whether they were created in C or Perl. In particular, the C code was creating log files with the execute bit set for the user and group which was just odd.
Standardize on 750/640 for both code paths.
Suggested by Damiano Albani.
The Perl versions remain because they are still being used by the Perl stanza commands. Once the stanza commands are migrated they can be removed.
Contributed by Cynthia Shang.
