I've never gotten this to work. When I bring up the copy on an intended standby system I always get the classic:
PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record
Failing that, I backed up with pg_start_backup/tar/pg_stop_backup as an alternative, but I was always curious what I was doing wrong.
The wiki page on setting up replication: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Streaming_Replication
says use the command with this options: pg_basebackup -h 192.168.0.10 -D /srv/pgsql/standby -P -U replication --xlog-method=stream
and I stumbled into option:
--checkpoint=fast
The standby was able to recover when I used one of these, I don't remember which, maybe both.
Should the doc be updated or am I missing something?
If you are using pg_basebackup without a log archive, then yes, you need --xlog-method=stream (or fetch). The checkpoint method only affects how quickly the checkpoint runs, it will always run.
If you do have a log archive, it should work fine without --xlog=stream, but you need to put your restore_command into recovery.conf manually.