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Tom Lane |
at Jun 15, 2011 at 5:12 pm
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Merlin Moncure writes:
Due to unfortunate environmental conditions (don't ask) I've been
trying to get postgres 9.0 up and running on a fairly ancient linux --
redhat EL 3 which as kernel 2.4.21. initdb borks on the create
database step with the error message "child process exited with error
code 139". A bit of tracing revealed the exit was happening at the
pg_flush_data which basically wraps posix_fadvise. Disabling fadvise
support in pg_config_manual.h fixed the problem.
Things brings up a couple of questions:
*) Are linuxes this old out of support?
RHEL3 is just about dead as far as Red Hat is concerned: only critical
security bugs will be addressed, and even that is going to stop in a
year or two. RH would certainly not recommend that you be trying to
put any new applications on that platform.
*) Should configure be testing for working posix_fadvise?
There isn't any reliable way to do that at configure time, I think.
We could add an AC_TRY_RUN call but it wouldn't be trustworthy; think
cross-compiles, or running on some other kernel version than where you
compiled. Unless the problem manifests on some not-quite-so-dead
platform, I'm not in favor of it.
regards, tom lane
