This is most likely just a request for brainstorm. It's been reported [1] that postmaster fails to start against staled postmaster.pid after (e.g.) power outage on Fedora, its due to init system parallelism and "some" other newly started process can already have allocated the same PID as the old postmaster had -- and in this case postmaster refuses to delete staled pidfile (which is expected as we need to be really careful).
Don't you see some other possible check we could implement to guarantee that the PID mentioned in postmaster.pid does not hide concurrent postmaster? I can think of /proc/<CONCURRENT_PID>/cmdline parsing for possible '-D' option occurrence, but that is not terribly portable and it could be considered racy, or? Some acceptable hack we could use to tell to other processes that we are running particular data directory? [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1257334 Pavel -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
