Hrm, something else that just came up. On 9.6+ we use sync_file_range. It's surely going to eat errors:
rc = sync_file_range(fd, offset, nbytes, SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE); /* don't error out, this is just a performance optimization */ if (rc != 0) { ereport(WARNING, (errcode_for_file_access(), errmsg("could not flush dirty data: %m"))); } so that has to panic too. I'm very suspicious about the safety of the msync() path too. I'll post an update to my PANIC-everywhere patch that add these cases.