Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 05:56:39PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> The implementation I'm visualizing is that a would-be client (think psql
>> or pg_dump, though the code would actually be in libpq) forks off a
>> process that becomes a standalone backend, and then they communicate
>> over a pair of pipes that were created before forking. This is
>> implementable on any platform that supports Postgres, because initdb
>> already relies on equivalent capabilities.
> I think the big question is whether we need to modify every binary that
> pg_upgrade executes to underestand this pipe communication method.
I think we can fix it once in libpq and we're done. It'd be driven
by some new connection-string option, and the clients as such would
never need to know that they're not talking to a regular postmaster.
regards, tom lane