Up until now, the total amount of data that could be passed to a
background worker at startup was one datum, which can be a small as
4 bytes on some systems. That's enough to pass a dsm_handle or an
array index, but not much else. Add a bgw_extra flag to the
BackgroundWorker struct, allowing up to 128 bytes to be passed to
a new worker on any platform.
Use this to fix a problem I recently discovered with the parallel
context machinery added in 9.5: the master assigns each worker an
array index, and each worker subsequently assigns itself an array
index, and there's nothing to guarantee that the two sets of indexes
match, leading to chaos.
Normally, I would not back-patch the change to add bgw_extra, since it
is basically a feature addition. However, since 9.5 is still in beta
and there seems to be no other sensible way to repair the broken
parallel context machinery, back-patch to 9.5. Existing background
worker code can ignore the bgw_extra field without a problem, but
might need to be recompiled since the structure size has changed.
Report and patch by me. Review by Amit Kapila.
Commit b0b0d84b3d663a148022e900ebfc164284a95f55 purported to make it
possible to relaunch workers using the same parallel context, but it had
an unpleasant race condition: we might reinitialize after the workers
have sent their last control message but before they have dettached the
DSM, leaving to crashes. Repair by introducing a new ParallelContext
operation, ReinitializeParallelDSM.
Adjust execParallel.c to use this new support, so that we can rescan a
Gather node by relaunching workers but without needing to recreate the
DSM.
Amit Kapila, with some adjustments by me. Extracted from latest parallel
sequential scan patch.
This may allow some callers to avoid the overhead involved in tearing
down a parallel context and then setting up a new one, which means
releasing the DSM and then allocating and populating a new one. I
suspect we'll want to revise the Gather node to make use of this new
capability, but even if not it may be useful elsewhere and requires
very little additional code.
In order for this to be safe, the code which hands true serializability
will need to taught that the SIRead locks taken by a parallel worker
pertain to the same transaction as those taken by the parallel leader.
Some further changes may be needed as well. Until the necessary
adaptations are made, don't generate parallel plans in serializable
mode, and if a previously-generated parallel plan is used after
serializable mode has been activated, run it serially.
This fixes a bug in commit 7aea8e4f2daa4b39ca9d1309a0c4aadb0f7ed81b.
check_role() tries to verify that the user has permission to become the
requested role, but this is inappropriate in a parallel worker, which
needs to exactly recreate the master's authorization settings. So skip
the check in that case.
This fixes a bug in commit 924bcf4f16d54c55310b28f77686608684734f42.
Starting a parallel worker transaction changes our notion of which XIDs
are in-progress or committed, and our notion of the current command
counter ID. Therefore, our view of these caches prior to starting
this transaction may no longer valid. Defend against that by clearing
them.
This fixes a bug in commit 924bcf4f16d54c55310b28f77686608684734f42.
Commit 2bd9e412f92bc6a68f3e8bcb18e04955cc35001d introduced a mechanism
for relaying protocol messages from a background worker to another
backend via a shm_mq. However, there was no provision for shutting
down the communication channel. Therefore, a protocol message sent
late in the shutdown sequence, such as a DEBUG message resulting from
cranking up log_min_messages, could crash the server. To fix, install
an on_dsm_detach callback that disables sending messages to the shm_mq
when the associated DSM is detached.
If a transaction or subtransaction creates a ParallelContext but ends
without calling InitializeParallelDSM, the previous code would
seg fault. Fix that.
This does four basic things. First, it provides convenience routines
to coordinate the startup and shutdown of parallel workers. Second,
it synchronizes various pieces of state (e.g. GUCs, combo CID
mappings, transaction snapshot) from the parallel group leader to the
worker processes. Third, it prohibits various operations that would
result in unsafe changes to that state while parallelism is active.
Finally, it propagates events that would result in an ErrorResponse,
NoticeResponse, or NotifyResponse message being sent to the client
from the parallel workers back to the master, from which they can then
be sent on to the client.
Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Noah Misch, Rushabh Lathia, Jeevan Chalke.
Suggestions and review from Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas, Noah
Misch, Simon Riggs, Euler Taveira, and Jim Nasby.
