Re: [HACKERS] Checksums by default?

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2017-01-21 12:46:05 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
>> Do you run with all defaults in those environments?

> Irrelevant - changing requires re-initdb'ing. That's unrealistic.

If you can't turn checksums *off* without re-initdb, that raises the
stakes for this enormously.  But why is that so hard?  Seems like if
you just stop checking them, you're done.  I see that we have the
state recorded in pg_control, but surely we could teach some utility
or other to update that file while the postmaster is stopped.

I think a reasonable prerequisite before we even consider this change
is a patch to make it possible to turn off checksumming.
        regards, tom lane