Just as we would start bgworkers immediately after an initial startup
of the server, we should restart them immediately when reinitializing.
Petr Jelinek and Robert Haas
The motivation for a crash and restart cycle when a backend dies is
that it might have corrupted shared memory on the way down; and we
can't recover reliably except by reinitializing everything. But that
doesn't apply to processes that don't touch shared memory. Currently,
there's nothing to prevent a background worker that doesn't request
shared memory access from touching shared memory anyway, but that's a
separate bug.
Previous to this commit, the coding in postmaster.c was inconsistent:
an exit status other than 0 or 1 didn't provoke a crash-and-restart,
but failure to release the postmaster child slot did. This change
makes those cases consistent.
Previously, in some places, socket creation errors were checked for
negative values, which is not true for Windows because sockets are
unsigned. This masked socket creation errors on Windows.
Backpatch through 9.0. 8.4 doesn't have the infrastructure to fix this.
Formerly, we set up the postmaster's signal handling only when we were
about to start launching subprocesses. This is a bad idea though, as
it means that for example a SIGINT arriving before that will kill the
postmaster instantly, perhaps leaving lockfiles, socket files, shared
memory, etc laying about. We'd rather that such a signal caused orderly
postmaster termination including releasing of those resources. A simple
fix is to move the PostmasterMain stanza that initializes signal handling
to an earlier point, before we've created any such resources. Then, an
early-arriving signal will be blocked until we're ready to deal with it
in the usual way. (The only part that really needs to be moved up is
blocking of signals, but it seems best to keep the signal handler
installation calls together with that; for one thing this ensures the
kernel won't drop any signals we wished to get. The handlers won't get
invoked in any case until we unblock signals in ServerLoop.)
Per a report from MauMau. He proposed changing the way "pg_ctl stop"
works to deal with this, but that'd just be masking one symptom not
fixing the core issue.
It's been like this since forever, so back-patch to all supported branches.
The code for matching clients to pg_hba.conf lines that specify host names
(instead of IP address ranges) failed to complain if reverse DNS lookup
failed; instead it silently didn't match, so that you might end up getting
a surprising "no pg_hba.conf entry for ..." error, as seen in bug #9518
from Mike Blackwell. Since we don't want to make this a fatal error in
situations where pg_hba.conf contains a mixture of host names and IP
addresses (clients matching one of the numeric entries should not have to
have rDNS data), remember the lookup failure and mention it as DETAIL if
we get to "no pg_hba.conf entry". Apply the same approach to forward-DNS
lookup failures, too, rather than treating them as immediate hard errors.
Along the way, fix a couple of bugs that prevented us from detecting an
rDNS lookup error reliably, and make sure that we make only one rDNS lookup
attempt; formerly, if the lookup attempt failed, the code would try again
for each host name entry in pg_hba.conf. Since more or less the whole
point of this design is to ensure there's only one lookup attempt not one
per entry, the latter point represents a performance bug that seems
sufficient justification for back-patching.
Also, adjust src/port/getaddrinfo.c so that it plays as well as it can
with this code. Which is not all that well, since it does not have actual
support for rDNS lookup, but at least it should return the expected (and
required by spec) error codes so that the main code correctly perceives the
lack of functionality as a lookup failure. It's unlikely that PG is still
being used in production on any machines that require our getaddrinfo.c,
so I'm not excited about working harder than this.
To keep the code in the various branches similar, this includes
back-patching commits c424d0d1052cb4053c8712ac44123f9b9a9aa3f2 and
1997f34db4687e671690ed054c8f30bb501b1168 into 9.2 and earlier.
Back-patch to 9.1 where the facility for hostnames in pg_hba.conf was
introduced.
In order for this to work, walsenders need the optional ability to
connect to a database, so the "replication" keyword now allows true
or false, for backward-compatibility, and the new value "database"
(which causes the "dbname" parameter to be respected).
walsender needs to loop not only when idle but also when sending
decoded data to the user and when waiting for more xlog data to decode.
This means that there are now three separate loops inside walsender.c;
although some refactoring has been done here, this is still a bit ugly.
Andres Freund, with contributions from Álvaro Herrera, and further
review by me.
We should not assume that struct timeval.tv_sec is a long, because
it ain't necessarily. (POSIX says that it's a time_t, which might
well be 64 bits now or in the future; or for that matter might be
32 bits on machines with 64-bit longs.) Per buildfarm member panther.
Back-patch to 9.3 where the dubious coding was introduced.
We used to have externs for getopt() and its API variables scattered
all over the place. Now that we find we're going to need to tweak the
variable declarations for Cygwin, it seems like a good idea to have
just one place to tweak.
In this commit, the variables are declared "#ifndef HAVE_GETOPT_H".
That may or may not work everywhere, but we'll soon find out.
Andres Freund
This makes it possible to store lwlocks as part of some other data
structure in the main shared memory segment, or in a dynamic shared
memory segment. There is still a main LWLock array and this patch does
not move anything out of it, but it provides necessary infrastructure
for doing that in the future.
This change is likely to increase the size of LWLockPadded on some
platforms, especially 32-bit platforms where it was previously only
16 bytes.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund and KaiGai Kohei.
Fix integer overflow issue noted by Magnus Hagander, as well as a bunch
of other infelicities in commit ee1e5662d8d8330726eaef7d3110cb7add24d058
and its unreasonably large number of followups.
Per reports from Andres Freund and Luke Campbell, a server failure during
set_pglocale_pgservice results in a segfault rather than a useful error
message, because the infrastructure needed to use ereport hasn't been
initialized; specifically, MemoryContextInit hasn't been called.
One known cause of this is starting the server in a directory it
doesn't have permission to read.
We could try to prevent set_pglocale_pgservice from using anything that
depends on palloc or elog, but that would be messy, and the odds of future
breakage seem high. Moreover there are other things being called in main.c
that look likely to use palloc or elog too --- perhaps those things
shouldn't be there, but they are there today. The best solution seems to
be to move the call of MemoryContextInit to very early in the backend's
real main() function. I've verified that an elog or ereport occurring
immediately after that is now capable of sending something useful to
stderr.
I also added code to elog.c to print something intelligible rather than
just crashing if MemoryContextInit hasn't created the ErrorContext.
This could happen if MemoryContextInit itself fails (due to malloc
failure), and provides some future-proofing against someone trying to
sneak in new code even earlier in server startup.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Since we've only heard reports of
this type of failure recently, it may be that some recent change has made
it more likely to see a crash of this kind; but it sure looks like it's
broken all the way back.
Instead of allocating a semaphore from the operating system for every
spinlock, allocate a fixed number of semaphores (by default, 1024)
from the operating system and multiplex all the spinlocks that get
created onto them. This could self-deadlock if a process attempted
to acquire more than one spinlock at a time, but since processes
aren't supposed to execute anything other than short stretches of
straight-line code while holding a spinlock, that shouldn't happen.
One motivation for this change is that, with the introduction of
dynamic shared memory, it may be desirable to create spinlocks that
last for less than the lifetime of the server. Without this change,
attempting to use such facilities under --disable-spinlocks would
quickly exhaust any supply of available semaphores. Quite apart
from that, it's desirable to contain the quantity of semaphores
needed to run the server simply on convenience grounds, since using
too many may make it harder to get PostgreSQL running on a new
platform, which is mostly the point of --disable-spinlocks in the
first place.
Patch by me; review by Tom Lane.
When wal_level=logical, we'll log columns from the old tuple as
configured by the REPLICA IDENTITY facility added in commit
07cacba983ef79be4a84fcd0e0ca3b5fcb85dd65. This makes it possible
a properly-configured logical replication solution to correctly
follow table updates even if they change the chosen key columns,
or, with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL, even if the table has no key at
all. Note that updates which do not modify the replica identity
column won't log anything extra, making the choice of a good key
(i.e. one that will rarely be changed) important to performance
when wal_level=logical is configured.
Each insert, update, or delete to a catalog table will also log
the CMIN and/or CMAX values of stamped by the current transaction.
This is necessary because logical decoding will require access to
historical snapshots of the catalog in order to decode some data
types, and the CMIN/CMAX values that we may need in order to judge
row visibility may have been overwritten by the time we need them.
Andres Freund, reviewed in various versions by myself, Heikki
Linnakangas, KONDO Mitsumasa, and many others.
When a backend process is forked, we initialize the system's random number
generator with srandom(). The seed used is derived from the backend's pid
and the timestamp. However, we only used the microseconds part of the
timestamp, and it was XORed with the pid, so the total range of different
seed values chosen was 0-999999. That's quite limited.
Change the code to also use the seconds part of the timestamp in the seed,
and shift the microseconds so that all 32 bits of the seed are used.
Honza Horak
Although previously-introduced APIs allow the process that registers a
background worker to obtain the worker's PID, there's no way to prevent
a worker that is not currently running from being restarted. This
patch introduces a new API TerminateBackgroundWorker() that prevents
the background worker from being restarted, terminates it if it is
currently running, and causes it to be unregistered if or when it is
not running.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and KaiGai Kohei.
Add asprintf(), pg_asprintf(), and psprintf() to simplify string
allocation and composition. Replacement implementations taken from
NetBSD.
Reviewed-by: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Reviewed-by: Asif Naeem <anaeem.it@gmail.com>
Clamp the minimum sleep time during immediate shutdown or crash to a
minimum of zero, not a maximum of one second. The previous code could
result in a negative sleep time, leading to failure in select() calls.
Also, on crash recovery, reset AbortStartTime as soon as SIGKILL is sent
or abort processing has commenced instead of waiting until the startup
process completes. Reset AbortStartTime as soon as SIGKILL is sent,
too, to avoid doing that repeatedly.
Per trouble report from Jeff Janes on
CAMkU=1xd3=wFqZwwuXPWe4BQs3h1seYo8LV9JtSjW5RodoPxMg@mail.gmail.com
Author: MauMau
Using the infrastructure provided by this patch, it's possible either
to wait for the startup of a dynamically-registered background worker,
or to poll the status of such a worker without waiting. In either
case, the current PID of the worker process can also be obtained.
As usual, worker_spi is updated to demonstrate the new functionality.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund.
We've seen multiple cases of people looking at the postmaster's original
stderr output to try to diagnose problems, not realizing/remembering that
their logging configuration is set up to send log messages somewhere else.
This seems particularly likely to happen in prepackaged distributions,
since many packagers patch the code to change the factory-standard logging
configuration to something more in line with their platform conventions.
In hopes of reducing confusion, emit a LOG message about this at the point
in startup where we are about to switch log output away from the original
stderr, providing a pointer to where to look instead. This message will
appear as the last thing in the original stderr output. (We might later
also try to emit such link messages when logging parameters are changed
on-the-fly; but that case seems to be both noticeably harder to do nicely,
and much less frequently a problem in practice.)
Per discussion, back-patch to 9.3 but not further.
In PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state, checkpointer process must be dead already.
But an immediate shutdown could make postmaster's state machine
transition to PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state even if checkpointer process is
still running, and which caused assertion failure. This bug was introduced
in commit 457d6cf049c57cabe9b46ea13f26138040a214ec.
This patch ensures that postmaster's state machine doesn't transition to
PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state in an immediate shutdown while checkpointer
process is running.
Previously one had to use slist_delete(), implying an additional scan of
the list, making this infrastructure considerably less efficient than
traditional Lists when deletion of element(s) in a long list is needed.
Modify the slist_foreach_modify() macro to support deleting the current
element in O(1) time, by keeping a "prev" pointer in addition to "cur"
and "next". Although this makes iteration with this macro a bit slower,
no real harm is done, since in any scenario where you're not going to
delete the current list element you might as well just use slist_foreach
instead. Improve the comments about when to use each macro.
Back-patch to 9.3 so that we'll have consistent semantics in all branches
that provide ilist.h. Note this is an ABI break for callers of
slist_foreach_modify().
Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Per discussion on pgsql-hackers, these aren't really needed. Interim
versions of the background worker patch had the worker starting with
signals already unblocked, which would have made this necessary.
But the final version does not, so we don't really need it; and it
doesn't work well with the new facility for starting dynamic background
workers, so just rip it out.
Also per discussion on pgsql-hackers, back-patch this change to 9.3.
It's best to get the API break out of the way before we do an
official release of this facility, to avoid more pain for extension
authors later.
There is a new API, RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker, which allows
an ordinary user backend to register a new background writer during
normal running. This means that it's no longer necessary for all
background workers to be registered during processing of
shared_preload_libraries, although the option of registering workers
at that time remains available.
When a background worker exits and will not be restarted, the
slot previously used by that background worker is automatically
released and becomes available for reuse. Slots used by background
workers that are configured for automatic restart can't (yet) be
released without shutting down the system.
This commit adds a new source file, bgworker.c, and moves some
of the existing control logic for background workers there.
Previously, there was little enough logic that it made sense to
keep everything in postmaster.c, but not any more.
This commit also makes the worker_spi contrib module into an
extension and adds a new function, worker_spi_launch, which can
be used to demonstrate the new facility.
In 9.3, there's no particular limit on the number of bgworkers;
instead, we just count up the number that are actually registered,
and use that to set MaxBackends. However, that approach causes
problems for Hot Standby, which needs both MaxBackends and the
size of the lock table to be the same on the standby as on the
master, yet it may not be desirable to run the same bgworkers in
both places. 9.3 handles that by failing to notice the problem,
which will probably work fine in nearly all cases anyway, but is
not theoretically sound.
A further problem with simply counting the number of registered
workers is that new workers can't be registered without a
postmaster restart. This is inconvenient for administrators,
since bouncing the postmaster causes an interruption of service.
Moreover, there are a number of applications for background
processes where, by necessity, the background process must be
started on the fly (e.g. parallel query). While this patch
doesn't actually make it possible to register new background
workers after startup time, it's a necessary prerequisite.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier.
In patch 82233ce7ea42, AbortStartTime wasn't being reset appropriately
after the restart sequence, causing subsequent iterations through
ServerLoop to malfunction.
On immediate shutdown, or during a restart-after-crash sequence,
postmaster used to send SIGQUIT (and then abandon ship if shutdown); but
this is not a good strategy if backends don't die because of that
signal. (This might happen, for example, if a backend gets tangled
trying to malloc() due to gettext(), as in an example illustrated by
MauMau.) This causes problems when later trying to restart the server,
because some processes are still attached to the shared memory segment.
Instead of just abandoning such backends to their fates, we now have
postmaster hang around for a little while longer, send a SIGKILL after
some reasonable waiting period, and then exit. This makes immediate
shutdown more reliable.
There is disagreement on whether it's best for postmaster to exit after
sending SIGKILL, or to stick around until all children have reported
death. If this controversy is resolved differently than what this patch
implements, it's an easy change to make.
Bug reported by MauMau in message 20DAEA8949EC4E2289C6E8E58560DEC0@maumau
MauMau and Álvaro Herrera
Latch activity was not being detected by non-database-connected workers; the
SIGUSR1 signal handler which is normally in charge of that was set to SIG_IGN.
Create a simple handler to call latch_sigusr1_handler instead.
Robert Haas (bug report and suggested fix)
Add a SignalUnconnectedWorkers() call so that non-database-connected background
workers are also notified when postmaster is SIGHUPped. Previously, only
database-connected workers were.
Michael Paquier (bug report and fix)
An oversight in commit e710b65c1c56ca7b91f662c63d37ff2e72862a94 allowed
database names beginning with "-" to be treated as though they were secure
command-line switches; and this switch processing occurs before client
authentication, so that even an unprivileged remote attacker could exploit
the bug, needing only connectivity to the postmaster's port. Assorted
exploits for this are possible, some requiring a valid database login,
some not. The worst known problem is that the "-r" switch can be invoked
to redirect the process's stderr output, so that subsequent error messages
will be appended to any file the server can write. This can for example be
used to corrupt the server's configuration files, so that it will fail when
next restarted. Complete destruction of database tables is also possible.
Fix by keeping the database name extracted from a startup packet fully
separate from command-line switches, as had already been done with the
user name field.
The Postgres project thanks Mitsumasa Kondo for discovering this bug,
Kyotaro Horiguchi for drafting the fix, and Noah Misch for recognizing
the full extent of the danger.
Security: CVE-2013-1899
Commit da07a1e8 was broken for EXEC_BACKEND because I failed to realize
that the MaxBackends recomputation needed to be duplicated by
subprocesses in SubPostmasterMain. However, instead of having the value
be recomputed at all, it's better to assign the correct value at
postmaster initialization time, and have it be propagated to exec'ed
backends via BackendParameters.
MaxBackends stays as zero until after modules in
shared_preload_libraries have had a chance to register bgworkers, since
the value is going to be untrustworthy till that's finished.
Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
Before this patch, streaming replication would refuse to start replicating
if the timeline in the primary doesn't exactly match the standby. The
situation where it doesn't match is when you have a master, and two
standbys, and you promote one of the standbys to become new master.
Promoting bumps up the timeline ID, and after that bump, the other standby
would refuse to continue.
There's significantly more timeline related logic in streaming replication
now. First of all, when a standby connects to primary, it will ask the
primary for any timeline history files that are missing from the standby.
The missing files are sent using a new replication command TIMELINE_HISTORY,
and stored in standby's pg_xlog directory. Using the timeline history files,
the standby can follow the latest timeline present in the primary
(recovery_target_timeline='latest'), just as it can follow new timelines
appearing in an archive directory.
START_REPLICATION now takes a TIMELINE parameter, to specify exactly which
timeline to stream WAL from. This allows the standby to request the primary
to send over WAL that precedes the promotion. The replication protocol is
changed slightly (in a backwards-compatible way although there's little hope
of streaming replication working across major versions anyway), to allow
replication to stop when the end of timeline reached, putting the walsender
back into accepting a replication command.
Many thanks to Amit Kapila for testing and reviewing various versions of
this patch.
