Hi, When testing EXEC_BACKEND on linux I see occasional test failures as long as I don't disable ASLR. There's a code comment to that effect:
* If testing EXEC_BACKEND on Linux, you should run this as root before * starting the postmaster: * * echo 0 >/proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space but I don't like doing that on a system wide basis. Linux allows disabling ASLR on a per-process basis using personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE). There's a wrapper binary to do that as well, setarch --addr-no-randomize. I was wondering if we should have postmaster do personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE) for EXEC_BACKEND builds? It seems nicer to make it automatically work than have people remember that they need to call "setarch --addr-no-randomize make check". Not that it actually matters for EXEC_BACKEND, but theoretically doing personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE) in postmaster is a tad more secure than doing it via setarch, as in the personality() case postmaster's layout itself is still randomized... Or perhaps we should just add a comment mentioning setarch. Greetings, Andres Freund