This section documents additional platform-specific issues regarding the installation and setup of PostgreSQL. Be sure to read the installation instructions, and in particular Section 17.1 as well. Also, check Chapter 33 regarding the interpretation of regression test results.
Platforms that are not covered here have no known platform-specific installation issues.
You can use GCC or the native IBM compiler xlc
to build PostgreSQL
on AIX.
AIX versions before 7.1 are no longer tested nor supported by the PostgreSQL community.
AIX can be somewhat peculiar with regards to the way it does memory management. You can have a server with many multiples of gigabytes of RAM free, but still get out of memory or address space errors when running applications. One example is loading of extensions failing with unusual errors. For example, running as the owner of the PostgreSQL installation:
=# CREATE EXTENSION plperl; ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql/lib/plperl.so": A memory address is not in the address space for the process.
Running as a non-owner in the group possessing the PostgreSQL installation:
=# CREATE EXTENSION plperl; ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql/lib/plperl.so": Bad address
Another example is out of memory errors in the PostgreSQL server logs, with every memory allocation near or greater than 256 MB failing.
The overall cause of all these problems is the default bittedness and memory model used by the server process. By default, all binaries built on AIX are 32-bit. This does not depend upon hardware type or kernel in use. These 32-bit processes are limited to 4 GB of memory laid out in 256 MB segments using one of a few models. The default allows for less than 256 MB in the heap as it shares a single segment with the stack.
In the case of the plperl example, above,
check your umask and the permissions of the binaries in your
PostgreSQL installation. The binaries involved in that example
were 32-bit and installed as mode 750 instead of 755. Due to the
permissions being set in this fashion, only the owner or a member
of the possessing group can load the library. Since it isn't
world-readable, the loader places the object into the process'
heap instead of the shared library segments where it would
otherwise be placed.
The “ideal” solution for this is to use a 64-bit build of PostgreSQL, but that is not always practical, because systems with 32-bit processors can build, but not run, 64-bit binaries.
If a 32-bit binary is desired, set LDR_CNTRL to
MAXDATA=0x,
where 1 <= n <= 8, before starting the PostgreSQL server,
and try different values and n0000000postgresql.conf
settings to find a configuration that works satisfactorily. This
use of LDR_CNTRL tells AIX that you want the
server to have MAXDATA bytes set aside for the
heap, allocated in 256 MB segments. When you find a workable
configuration,
ldedit can be used to modify the binaries so
that they default to using the desired heap size. PostgreSQL can
also be rebuilt, passing configure
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bmaxdata:0x
to achieve the same effect.
n0000000"
For a 64-bit build, set OBJECT_MODE to 64 and
pass CC="gcc -maix64"
and LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bbigtoc"
to configure. (Options for
xlc might differ.) If you omit the export of
OBJECT_MODE, your build may fail with linker errors. When
OBJECT_MODE is set, it tells AIX's build utilities
such as ar, as, and ld what
type of objects to default to handling.
By default, overcommit of paging space can happen. While we have not seen this occur, AIX will kill processes when it runs out of memory and the overcommit is accessed. The closest to this that we have seen is fork failing because the system decided that there was not enough memory for another process. Like many other parts of AIX, the paging space allocation method and out-of-memory kill is configurable on a system- or process-wide basis if this becomes a problem.
PostgreSQL can be built using Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, but that method is inferior to the native Windows build (see Chapter 18) and running a server under Cygwin is no longer recommended.
When building from source, proceed according to the Unix-style
installation procedure (i.e., ./configure;
make; etc.), noting the following Cygwin-specific
differences:
Set your path to use the Cygwin bin directory before the Windows utilities. This will help prevent problems with compilation.
The adduser command is not supported; use
the appropriate user management application on Windows.
Otherwise, skip this step.
The su command is not supported; use ssh to
simulate su on Windows. Otherwise, skip this step.
OpenSSL is not supported.
Start cygserver for shared memory support.
To do this, enter the command /usr/sbin/cygserver
&. This program needs to be running anytime you
start the PostgreSQL server or initialize a database cluster
(initdb). The
default cygserver configuration may need to
be changed (e.g., increase SEMMNS) to prevent
PostgreSQL from failing due to a lack of system resources.
Building might fail on some systems where a locale other than
C is in use. To fix this, set the locale to C by doing
export LANG=C.utf8 before building, and then
setting it back to the previous setting after you have installed
PostgreSQL.
The parallel regression tests (make check)
can generate spurious regression test failures due to
overflowing the listen() backlog queue
which causes connection refused errors or hangs. You can limit
the number of connections using the make
variable MAX_CONNECTIONS thus:
make MAX_CONNECTIONS=5 check
(On some systems you can have up to about 10 simultaneous connections.)
It is possible to install cygserver and the
PostgreSQL server as Windows NT services. For information on how
to do this, please refer to the README
document included with the PostgreSQL binary package on Cygwin.
It is installed in the
directory /usr/share/doc/Cygwin.
To build PostgreSQL from source on macOS, you will need to install Apple's command line developer tools, which can be done by issuing
xcode-select --install
(note that this will pop up a GUI dialog window for confirmation). You may or may not wish to also install Xcode.
On recent macOS releases, it's necessary to
embed the “sysroot” path in the include switches used to
find some system header files. This results in the outputs of
the configure script varying depending on
which SDK version was used during configure.
That shouldn't pose any problem in simple scenarios, but if you are
trying to do something like building an extension on a different machine
than the server code was built on, you may need to force use of a
different sysroot path. To do that, set PG_SYSROOT,
for example
make PG_SYSROOT=/desired/path all
To find out the appropriate path on your machine, run
xcrun --show-sdk-path
Note that building an extension using a different sysroot version than was used to build the core server is not really recommended; in the worst case it could result in hard-to-debug ABI inconsistencies.
You can also select a non-default sysroot path when configuring, by
specifying PG_SYSROOT
to configure:
./configure ... PG_SYSROOT=/desired/path
This would primarily be useful to cross-compile for some other macOS version. There is no guarantee that the resulting executables will run on the current host.
To suppress the -isysroot options altogether, use
./configure ... PG_SYSROOT=none
(any nonexistent pathname will work). This might be useful if you wish to build with a non-Apple compiler, but beware that that case is not tested or supported by the PostgreSQL developers.
macOS's “System Integrity
Protection” (SIP) feature breaks make check,
because it prevents passing the needed setting
of DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH down to the executables being
tested. You can work around that by doing make
install before make check.
Most PostgreSQL developers just turn off SIP, though.
PostgreSQL for Windows can be built using MinGW, a Unix-like build environment for Microsoft operating systems, or using Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler suite. The MinGW build procedure uses the normal build system described in this chapter; the Visual C++ build works completely differently and is described in Chapter 18.
The native Windows port requires a 32 or 64-bit version of Windows
2000 or later. Earlier operating systems do
not have sufficient infrastructure (but Cygwin may be used on
those). MinGW, the Unix-like build tools, and MSYS, a collection
of Unix tools required to run shell scripts
like configure, can be downloaded
from http://www.mingw.org/. Neither is
required to run the resulting binaries; they are needed only for
creating the binaries.
To build 64 bit binaries using MinGW, install the 64 bit tool set
from https://mingw-w64.org/, put its bin
directory in the PATH, and run
configure with the
--host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 option.
After you have everything installed, it is suggested that you
run psql
under CMD.EXE, as the MSYS console has
buffering issues.
If PostgreSQL on Windows crashes, it has the ability to generate
minidumps that can be used to track down the cause
for the crash, similar to core dumps on Unix. These dumps can be
read using the Windows Debugger Tools or using
Visual Studio. To enable the generation of dumps
on Windows, create a subdirectory named crashdumps
inside the cluster data directory. The dumps will then be written
into this directory with a unique name based on the identifier of
the crashing process and the current time of the crash.
PostgreSQL is well-supported on Solaris. The more up to date your operating system, the fewer issues you will experience.
You can build with either GCC or Sun's compiler suite. For
better code optimization, Sun's compiler is strongly recommended
on the SPARC architecture. If
you are using Sun's compiler, be careful not to select
/usr/ucb/cc;
use /opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc.
You can download Sun Studio from https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/downloads/. Many GNU tools are integrated into Solaris 10, or they are present on the Solaris companion CD. If you need packages for older versions of Solaris, you can find these tools at http://www.sunfreeware.com. If you prefer sources, look at https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.
If configure complains about a failed test
program, this is probably a case of the run-time linker being
unable to find some library, probably libz, libreadline or some
other non-standard library such as libssl. To point it to the
right location, set the LDFLAGS environment
variable on the configure command line, e.g.,
configure ... LDFLAGS="-R /usr/sfw/lib:/opt/sfw/lib:/usr/local/lib"
See the ld man page for more information.
On the SPARC architecture, Sun Studio is strongly recommended for
compilation. Try using the -xO5 optimization
flag to generate significantly faster binaries. Do not use any
flags that modify behavior of floating-point operations
and errno processing (e.g.,
-fast).
If you do not have a reason to use 64-bit binaries on SPARC, prefer the 32-bit version. The 64-bit operations are slower and 64-bit binaries are slower than the 32-bit variants. On the other hand, 32-bit code on the AMD64 CPU family is not native, so 32-bit code is significantly slower on that CPU family.
Yes, using DTrace is possible. See Section 28.5 for further information.
If you see the linking of the postgres executable abort with an
error message like:
Undefined first referenced symbol in file AbortTransaction utils/probes.o CommitTransaction utils/probes.o ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to postgres collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [postgres] Error 1
your DTrace installation is too old to handle probes in static functions. You need Solaris 10u4 or newer to use DTrace.