David I just tried installing PG 9.2.2 on FreeBSD 8.3 and initdb went smoothly without any problems. the only difference would be that I had it running in a virtualbox instance. My config were as follows;
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p5 (binary updated through freebsd-update) PG 9.2.2 (installed through ports) root filesystem on UFS ZFS mounted on /example PG data directory set to /example/pgsql/data relevant rc.conf entries: postgresql_enable="YES" postgresql_data="/example/pgsql/data" running "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/postgresql initdb" works perfectly. Just needed to set the correct permissions on /example/pgsql directory. Amitabh On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 10:32 AM, David Noel <david.i.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You need to talk to some FreeBSD kernel hackers about why link() > > might be failing here. Since you see it on UFS too, we can probably > > exonerate the ZFS filesystem-specific code. > > > > I did some googling and found that EPERM can be issued if the filesystem > > doesn't support hard links (which shouldn't apply to ZFS I trust). > > Also, Linux has a "protected_hardlinks" option that causes certain > > attempts at creating hard links to fail --- but our use-case here > > doesn't fall foul of any of those restrictions AFAICS, and of course > > FreeBSD isn't Linux. Still, I wonder if you're running into some > > misdesigned or misimplemented security restriction. You might want > > to look at your kernel parameters and see if any of them look like > > they might have to do with restricting hard-link operations. > > > > Also, since Amitabh failed to duplicate the failure on both earlier > > and later FreeBSD kernels, and we've not heard reports of this from > > anybody else either, it seems more than possible that it's a plain > > old bug in the specific kernel version you're using. > > > > As a short-term workaround, I'd suggest rebuilding with > > HAVE_WORKING_LINK disabled. (Just remove that #define from > > src/include/pg_config_manual.h and rebuild.) > > OK, thanks. I've gotten in touch with the freebsd-hackers mailing > list. Hopefully we'll be able to get this one figured out. > > I compiled a GENERIC kernel and tried it again. Still no luck. But at > least we know now it wasn't a configuration error. >
