The primary goal of the block incremental backup is to save space in the repository by only storing changed parts of a file rather than the entire file. This implementation is focused on restore performance more than saving space in the repository, though there may be substantial savings depending on the workload.
The repo-block option enables the feature (when repo-bundle is already enabled). The block size is determined based on the file size and age. Very old or very small files will not use block incremental.
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.
When this code was migrated to C the unit tests were not included because there were more important priorities at the time.
This also requires some adjustments to coverage because of the new code location.
Calculate a checksum of the data stored in the repository when a file is transformed (e.g. compressed). This allows resume and verify to operate without needing to decompress/decrypt the data.
This can also be used to verify more complex formats such as block incremental and allow backups from the repository without needing to decompress the data to verify the checksum.
Add some basic encrypted tests to maintain coverage. These will be expanded in a future commit.
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.
The reference list was previously built at load time from whichever references existed in the file list. This was sufficient since the list was for informational purposes only.
The block incremental feature will require a reference list that contains all prior backups, even those that are not explicitly referenced from the manifest. Therefore it makes sense to build and persist a manifest list rather than building it at load time.
This list can still be used for informational purposes, though it needs to be sorted since the list it sill built for older manifest versions and may not be in sorted order.
Add strLstFindIdx() to find references in the list.
This appears to have been an oversight in 34d6495. Storing the reference is not really correct since the file is not stored in a prior backup. It also uses more space.
There is no real harm in storing the reference, since it is always ignored on restore, but the code is simpler if the zero-length files can be dealt with during the manifest and don't need additional handling later on. This is also an important part of some upcoming optimizations.
All unit and performance tests are now built by the C harness.
Remove all unit/performance test build code from Perl.
Remove code from C harness that is no longer used. This code was included so the C harness could be run separately, but that is no longer needed with this full integration.
The C test harness is used for unit tests from the Perl harness where possible. Currently, unit tests can be run in the C harness when --no-coverage is specified and --profile is not specified.
C harness tests work on meson 0.45.
The C harness runs with valgrind by default. Valgrind can be disabled with --no-valgrind.
Also rebuild containers to add meson and update the documentation so that meson builds will work (even though we don't do them yet).
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.
Meson is a new build system that offers simpler syntax and superior performance to autoconf/make. In addition, Windows is supported natively.
The Meson build appears complete, but currently is used only for auto-generation of code and the host build of pgbackrest. Some container upgrades will be required before Meson can be used for container builds.
Also patch the Debian package to force autoconf/make rather than Meson.
Stopping the cluster has started consistently running out of memory on PostgreSQL 9.1. This seems to have happened after pulling in new packages at some point so it might be build related.
Stopping the cluster is not critical for 9.1 so skip it.
These files were never intended to be compiled on their own so the .c extension was a bit misleading. In particular Meson does not like .c files that are not intended to be compiled independently.
Leave header files as is since they are already protected against being included more than once and are never expected to be compiled.
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.
Only set -DDEBUG_MEM for the modules currently being tested rather than globally.
Also run tests in a temp mem context. Running in the top context can confuse memory accounting when a new context is created in the top context.
In offline mode the pg_wal directory is copied, but that is not the same as archive-copy, which copies the exact set of WAL required from the archive.
This flag is purely for informational purposes so there is no live bug here, but the prior behavior was certainly misleading.
The unit tests were ignoring stderr but nothing being output there was important. Now a test will fail if there is anything on stderr.
This makes it easier to work with -fsanitize, which outputs to stderr.
The manifest test module was setting a blank value here and causing a stack overflow because memcpy() is used instead of strcpy().
This was really just a test issue but add an assert just in case the same were to happen in production code.
Also update a bogus checksum in the integration tests to the correct length to avoid running afoul of the assert.
Found with -fsanitize=address.
This rule was added because there were not sufficient tests to demonstrate that the repo-hardlink option could be changed in a backup set.
Remove the restriction and add/update tests to show that it works.
This is necessary now because bundling requires that hardlinking be disabled. Rather than add code complexity, it seems better just to address this limitation.
It seems best for these to be repo options so they can be configured per repo, rather than globally.
All clarify usage for repo-bundle-size and repo-bundle-limit.
Rather than attempting to filter page checksum failures by LSN, just retry when there is a page checksum failure. If the page has not changed since the last read report it as an error. If the page has changed, then PostgreSQL must be modifying the page so we can ignore the error because a full page write (and possibly updates) will be in the WAL.
Also remove tests made redundant by the test merge in b4897077.
Bundle (combine) smaller files during backup to reduce the number of files written to the repository (enable with --bundle). Reducing the number of files is a benefit on all file systems, but especially so on object stores such as S3 that have a high file creation cost. Another benefit is that zero-length files are only stored as metadata in the manifest.
Files are batched up to bundle-size and then compressed/encrypted individually and stored sequentially in the bundle. The bundle id and offset of each file is stored in the manifest so files can be retrieved randomly without needing to read the entire bundle. Files are ordered by timestamp descending when being assigned to bundles to reduce the amount of random access that needs to be done. The idea is that bundles with older files can be read in their entirety on restore and only bundles with newer files will get fragmented.
Bundles are a custom format with metadata stored in the manifest. Tar was considered but it is too limited a format, the major issue being that the size of the file must be known in advance and that is very contrary to how pgBackRest works, especially once we introduce page-level incremental backups.
Bundles are stored numbered in the bundle directory. Some files may still end up in pg_data if they are added after the backup is complete. backup_label is an example.
Currently, only the backup command works in batches. The restore and verify commands use the offsets to pull individual files out of the bundle. It seems better to finalize how this is going to work before optimizing the other commands. Even as is, this is a major step forward, and all commands function with bundling.
One caveat: resume is currently not supported when bundle is enabled.
The most recent release of Minio has broken CI builds but there is no logging to indicate what is wrong.
For now, just use the prior release to get CI builds working again. This kind if breakage is not uncommon for Minio but they usually resolve it in the next 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.
Manifest defaults for user, group, and mode were previously generated by scanning the data to find the most common values. This was very accurate but slow and complicated. It could also lead to surprising changes in the manifest when a default value suddenly changed.
Instead, use the $PGDATA path to generate defaults. In the vast majority of cases the same user/group should own all the path/files and the default file mode is easily derived from the path mode. There may be some edge cases where this generates larger manifests, but in general it reduces time and complexity when saving the manifest.
Remove the MCV code since it is longer longer used.
Change the mode back to 0700 earlier to reduce churn in the expect logs.
This will be especially important in a future commit that gets the defaults exclusively from the base path.
This flag was only being used by the backup command after manifestNewBuild() and had no other uses. There was a time when it was important for integration testing but the unit tests now fulfill this role.
Since backup is the only code concerned with the primary flag, move the code into the backup module.
We don't have any cross-version testing but this change was tested manually with the most recent version of pgBackRest to make sure it was tolerant of the missing primary info. When an older version of pgBackRest loads a newer manifest the primary flag will always be set to false, which is fine since it is not used.
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.
A CHECK() worked exactly like ASSERT() except that it was compiled into production code. However, over time many checks have been added that should not throw AssertError, which should be reserved for probable coding errors.
Allow the error code to be specified so other error types can be thrown. Also add a human-readable message since many of these could be seen by users even when there is no coding error.
Update coverage exceptions for CHECK() to match ASSERT() since all conditions will never be covered.
This test was lost due to a syntax issue in a58635ac.
Update the test to use system() to better mimic what postgres does and add logging so pgBackRest timing can be determined.
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.
This is mostly to revert some comment changes in b11ab9f7 that will break the ppc64le patch, but at the same time keep the spelling consistent in all comments and documentation.
Also revert some space changes for the same reason.
