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.
The additional details include databases that can be used for selective restore and a list of tablespaces and symlinks with their default destinations.
This information is not included in the JSON output because it requires reading the manifest which is too IO intensive to do for all manifests. We plan to include this information for JSON in a future release.
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.
The backup manifest stores a complete list of all files, links, and paths in a backup along with metadata such as checksums, sizes,
timestamps, etc. A list of databases is also included for selective restore.
The purpose of the manifest is to allow the restore command to confidently reconstruct the PostgreSQL data directory and ensure that
nothing is missing or corrupt. It is also useful for reporting, e.g. size of backup, backup time, etc.
For now, migrate enough functionality to implement the restore command.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
Info files required three copies in memory to be loaded (the original string, an ini representation, and the final info object). Not only was this memory inefficient but the Ini object does sequential scans when searching for keys making large files very slow to load.
This has not been an issue since archive.info and backup.info are very small, but it becomes a big deal when loading manifests with hundreds of thousands of files.
Instead of holding copies of the data in memory, use a callback to deliver the ini data directly to the object when loading. Use a similar method for save to avoid having an intermediate copy. Save is a bit complex because sections/keys must be written in alpha order or older versions of pgBackRest will not calculate the correct checksum.
Also move the load retry logic to helper functions rather than embedding it in the Info object. This allows for more flexibility in loading and ensures that stack traces will be available when developing unit tests.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
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.)
The {[os-type-is-centos]} expression was missing parens which meant "and" expressions built on it would always evaluate true if the os-type was centos6.
Reported by Joe Ayers, John Harvey.
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.
pgBackRest was being built by root in the documentation which is definitely not best practice.
Instead build as the unprivileged default container user. Sudo privileges are still required to install.
Suggested by Laurenz Albe.
storagePosixInfoList() processed each directory in a single memory context. If the directory contained hundreds of thousands of files processing became very slow due to the number of allocations.
Instead, reset the memory context every thousand files to minimize the number of allocations active at once, improving both speed and memory consumption.
Reported by Jens Wilke.
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.
Bug Fixes:
* Retry S3 RequestTimeTooSkewed errors instead of immediately terminating. (Reported by sean0101n, Tim Garton, Jesper St John, Aleš Zelený.)
* Fix incorrect handling of transfer-encoding response to HEAD request. (Reported by Pavel Suderevsky.)
* Fix scoping violations exposed by optimizations in gcc 9. (Reported by Christian Lange, Ned T. Crigler.)
Features:
* Add repo-s3-port option for setting a non-standard S3 service port.
Improvements:
* The local command for backup is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by David Steele, Cynthia Shang.)
* The check command is implemented partly in C. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Implement switch WAL and archive check in C but leave the rest in Perl for now.
The main idea was to have some real integration tests for the new database code so the rest of the migration can wait.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
Migrate functionality from the Perl Db module to C. For now this is just enough to implement the WAL switch check.
Add the dbGet() helper function to get Db objects easily.
Create macros in harnessPq to make writing pq scripts easier by grouping commonly used functions together.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
The cause of this error seems to be that a failed request takes so long that a subsequent retry at the http level uses outdated headers.
We're not sure if pgBackRest it to blame here (in one case a kernel downgrade fixed it, in another case an incorrect network driver was the problem) so add retries to hopefully deal with the issue if it is not too persistent. If SSL_write() has long delays before reporting an error then this will obviously affect backup performance.
Reported by sean0101n, Tim Garton, Jesper St John, Aleš Zelený.
If this option is set then ports appended to repo-s3-endpoint or repo-s3-host will be ignored.
Setting this option explicitly may be the only way to use a bare ipv6 address with S3 (since multiple colons confuse the parser) but we plan to improve this in the future.
This direct interface to libpq allows simple queries to be run against PostgreSQL and supports timeouts.
Testing is performed using a shim that can use scripted responses to test all aspects of the client code. The shim will be very useful for testing backup scenarios on complex topologies.
Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.
The local process is now entirely migrated to C. Since all major I/O operations are performed in the local process, the vast majority of I/O is now performed in C.
Contributed by David Steele, Cynthia Shang.
The HTTP server can use either content-length or transfer-encoding to indicate that there is content in the response. HEAD requests do not include content but return all the same headers as GET. In the HEAD case we were ignoring content-length but not transfer-encoding which led to unexpected eof errors on AWS S3. Our test server, minio, uses content-length so this was not caught in integration testing.
Ignore all content for HEAD requests (no matter how it is reported) and add a unit test for transfer-encoding to prevent a regression.
Found by Pavel Suderevsky.
gcc < 9 makes all compound literals function scope, even though the C spec requires them to be invalid outside the current scope. Since the compiler and valgrind were not enforcing this we had a few violations which caused problems in gcc >= 9.
Even though we are not quite ready to support gcc 9 officially, fix the scoping violations that currently exist in the codebase.
Reported by chrlange, Ned T. Crigler.
Maintaining the storage layer/drivers in two languages is burdensome. Since the integration tests require the Perl storage layer/drivers we'll need them even after the core code is migrated to C. Create an interface layer so the Perl code can be removed and new storage drivers/features introduced without adding Perl equivalents.
The goal is to move the integration tests to C so this interface will eventually be removed. That being the case, the interface was designed for maximum compatibility to ease the transition. The result looks a bit hacky but we'll improve it as needed until it can be retired.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix archive retention expiring too aggressively. (Fixed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Mohamad El-Rifai.)
Improvements:
* The expire command is implemented entirely in C. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* The local command for restore is implemented entirely in C.
* Remove hard-coded PostgreSQL user so $PGUSER works. (Suggested by Julian Zhang, Janis Puris.)
* Honor configure --prefix option. (Suggested by Daniel Westermann.)
* Rename repo-s3-verify-ssl option to repo-s3-verify-tls. The new name is preferred because pgBackRest does not support any SSL protocol versions (they are all considered to be insecure). The old name will continue to be accepted.
Documentation Improvements:
* Add FAQ to the documentation. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Use wal_level=replica in the documentation for PostgreSQL ≥ 9.6. (Suggested by Patrick McLaughlin.)
The problem expressed when repo1-archive-retention-type was set to diff. In this case repo1-archive-retention ended up being effectively equal to one, which meant PITR recovery was only possible from the last backup. WAL required for consistency was still preserved for all backups.
This issue is not present in the C migration committed at 434cd832, which was written before this bug was reported. Even so, we wanted to note this issue in the release notes in case any other users have been affected.
Fixed by Cynthia Shang.
Reported by Mohamad El-Rifai.
This implementation duplicates the functionality of the Perl code but does so with different logic and includes full unit tests.
Along the way at least one bug was fixed, see issue #748.
Contributed by Cynthia Shang.
The PostgreSQL user was hard-coded to the OS user which libpq will automatically use if $PGUSER is not set, so this code was redundant and prevented $PGUSER from working when set.
Suggested by Julian Zhang, Janis Puris.
These names more accurately reflect what the functions do and follow the convention started in Info and InfoPg.
Also remove the ignoreMissing parameter since it was never used.
Contributed by Cynthia Shang.
The documentation was using wal_level=hot_standby which is a deprecated setting.
Also remove the reference to wal_level=archive since it is no longer supported and is not recommended for older versions.
Suggested by Patrick McLaughlin.
The release notes are generally a direct reflection of the git log. So, ease the burden of maintaining the release notes by using the git log to determine what needs to be added.
Currently only non-dev items are required to be matched to a git commit but the goal is to account for all commits.
The git history cache is generated from the git log but can be modified to correct typos and match the release notes as they evolve. The commit hash is used to identify commits that have already been added to the cache.
There's plenty more to do here. For instance, links to the commits for each release item should be added to the release notes.
