The race condition goes like this:
1. GetNewTransactionId advances nextXid e.g. from 100 to 101
2. GetOldestActiveTransactionId reads the new nextXid, 101
3. GetOldestActiveTransactionId loops through the proc array. There are no
active XIDs there, so it returns 101 as the oldest active XID.
4. GetNewTransactionid stores XID 100 to MyPgXact->xid
So, GetOldestActiveTransactionId returned XID 101, even though 100 only
just started and is surely still running.
This would be hard to hit in practice, and even harder to spot any ill
effect if it happens. GetOldestActiveTransactionId is only used when
creating a checkpoint in a master server, and the race condition can only
happen on an online checkpoint, as there are no backends running during a
shutdown checkpoint. The oldestActiveXid value of an online checkpoint is
only used when starting up a hot standby server, to determine the starting
point where pg_subtrans is initialized from. For the race condition to
happen, there must be no other XIDs in the proc array that would hold back
the oldest-active XID value, which means that the missed XID must be a top
transaction's XID. However, pg_subtrans is not used for top XIDs, so I
believe an off-by-one error is in fact inconsequential. Nevertheless, let's
fix it, as it's clearly wrong and the fix is simple.
This has been wrong ever since hot standby was introduced, so backport to
all supported versions.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/e7258662-82b6-7a45-56d4-99b337a32bf7@iki.fi
Back in ed0b409, PGPROC was split and moved to static variables in
procarray.c, with procs in ProcArrayStruct replaced by an array of
integers representing process numbers (pgprocnos), with -1 indicating a
dead process which has yet to be removed. Access to procArray is
generally done under ProcArrayLock and therefore most code does not have
to concern itself with -1 entries.
However, MinimumActiveBackends intentionally does not take
ProcArrayLock, which means it has to be extra careful when accessing
procArray. Prior to ed0b409, this was handled by checking for a NULL
in the pointer array, but that check was no longer valid after the
split. Coverity pointed out that the check could never happen and so
it was removed in 5592eba. That didn't make anything worse, but it
didn't fix the issue either.
The correct fix is to check for pgprocno == -1 and skip over that entry
if it is encountered.
Back-patch to 9.2, since there can be attempts to access the arrays
prior to their start otherwise. Note that the changes prior to 9.4 will
look a bit different due to the change in 5592eba.
Note that MinimumActiveBackends only returns a bool for heuristic
purposes and any pre-array accesses are strictly read-only and so there
is no security implication and the lack of fields complaints indicates
it's very unlikely to run into issues due to this.
Pointed out by Noah.
This was not changed in HEAD, but will be done later as part of a
pgindent run. Future pgindent runs will also do this.
Report by Tom Lane
Backpatch through all supported branches, but not HEAD
These bugs can cause data loss on standbys started with hot_standby=on at
the moment they start to accept read only queries, by marking committed
transactions as uncommited. The likelihood of such corruptions is small
unless the primary has a high transaction rate.
5a031a5556 fixed bugs in HS's startup logic
by maintaining less state until at least STANDBY_SNAPSHOT_PENDING state
was reached, missing the fact that both clog and subtrans are written to
before that. This only failed to fail in common cases because the usage
of ExtendCLOG in procarray.c was superflous since clog extensions are
actually WAL logged.
f44eedc3f0f347a856eea8590730769125964597/I then tried to fix the missing
extensions of pg_subtrans due to the former commit's changes - which are
not WAL logged - by performing the extensions when switching to a state
> STANDBY_INITIALIZED and not performing xid assignments before that -
again missing the fact that ExtendCLOG is unneccessary - but screwed up
twice: Once because latestObservedXid wasn't updated anymore in that
state due to the earlier commit and once by having an off-by-one error in
the loop performing extensions. This means that whenever a
CLOG_XACTS_PER_PAGE (32768 with default settings) boundary was crossed
between the start of the checkpoint recovery started from and the first
xl_running_xact record old transactions commit bits in pg_clog could be
overwritten if they started and committed in that window.
Fix this mess by not performing ExtendCLOG() in HS at all anymore since
it's unneeded and evidently dangerous and by performing subtrans
extensions even before reaching STANDBY_SNAPSHOT_PENDING.
Analysis and patch by Andres Freund. Reported by Christophe Pettus.
Backpatch down to 9.0, like the previous commit that caused this.
In some cases with higher numbers of subtransactions
it was possible for us to incorrectly initialize
subtrans leading to complaints of missing pages.
Bug report by Sergey Konoplev
Analysis and fix by Andres Freund
When HS startup is deferred because of overflowed subtransactions, ensure
that we re-initialize KnownAssignedXids for when both existing and incoming
snapshots have non-zero qualifying xids.
Fixes bug #6661 reported by Valentine Gogichashvili.
Analysis and fix by Andres Freund
When the "hot" members of PGPROC were split off to separate PGXACT structs,
many PGPROC fields referred to in comments were moved to PGXACT, but the
comments were neglected in the commit. Mostly this is just a search/replace
of PGPROC with PGXACT, but the way the dummy PGPROC entries are created for
prepared transactions changed more, making some of the comments totally
bogus.
Noah Misch
Originally, most of this code assumed that no Postgres backends could be
running concurrently with it, and so no locking could be needed. That
assumption fails in Hot Standby. While it's still true that Hot Standby
backends should never change values like nextXid, they can examine them,
and consistency is important in some cases such as when computing a
snapshot. Therefore, prudence requires that WAL replay code obtain the
relevant locks when modifying such variables, even though it can examine
them without taking a lock. We were following that coding rule in some
places but not all. This commit applies the coding rule uniformly to all
updates of ShmemVariableCache and MultiXactState fields; a search of the
replay routines did not find any other cases that seemed to be at risk.
In addition, this commit fixes a longstanding thinko in replay of NEXTOID
and checkpoint records: we tried to advance nextOid only if it was behind
the value in the WAL record, but the comparison would draw the wrong
conclusion if OID wraparound had occurred since the previous value.
Better to just unconditionally assign the new value, since OID assignment
shouldn't be happening during replay anyway.
The additional locking seems to be more in the nature of future-proofing
than fixing any live bug, so I am not going to back-patch it. The NEXTOID
fix will be back-patched separately.
We log AccessExclusiveLocks for replay onto standby nodes,
but because of timing issues on ProcArray it is possible to
log a lock that is still held by a just committed transaction
that is very soon to be removed. To avoid any timing issue we
avoid applying locks made by transactions with InvalidXid.
Simon Riggs, bug report Tom Lane, diagnosis Pavan Deolasee
Heikki Linnakangas had the idea of rearranging GetSnapshotData to
avoid checking for sub-XIDs when no top-level XID is present. This
patch does that plus further a bit of further, related rearrangement.
Benchmarking show a significant improvement on unlogged tables at
higher concurrency levels, and mostly indifferent result on permanent
tables (which are presumably bottlenecked elsewhere). Most of the
benefit seems to come from using the new NormalTransactionIdPrecedes()
macro rather than the function call TransactionIdPrecedes().
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
There was a timing window between when oldestActiveXid was derived
and when it should have been derived that only shows itself under
heavy load. Move code around to ensure correct timing of derivation.
No change to StartupSUBTRANS() code, which is where this failed.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
If the initial snapshot had overflowed then we can start whenever
the latest snapshot is empty, not overflowed or as we did already,
start when the xmin on primary was higher than xmax of our starting
snapshot, which proves we have full snapshot data.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
A transaction can export a snapshot with pg_export_snapshot(), and then
others can import it with SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT. The data does not
leave the server so there are not security issues. A snapshot can only
be imported while the exporting transaction is still running, and there
are some other restrictions.
I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the bases for SSI (true
serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser isolation modes.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and rather heavily modified
by Tom Lane
There's no need to clamp the standby's xmin to be greater than
GetOldestXmin's result; if there were any such need this logic would be
hopelessly inadequate anyway, because it fails to account for
within-database versus cluster-wide values of GetOldestXmin. So get rid of
that, and just rely on sanity-checking that the xmin is not wrapped around
relative to the nextXid counter. Also, don't reset the walsender's xmin if
the current feedback xmin is indeed out of range; that just creates more
problems than we already had. Lastly, don't bother to take the
ProcArrayLock; there's no need to do that to set xmin.
Also improve the comments about this in GetOldestXmin itself.
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.
This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
contains newly-inserted tuples that according to our OldestXmin are not
yet visible to everyone. The value returned by GetOldestXmin() is conservative,
and it can move backwards on repeated calls, so if we see that contradiction
between the PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag and status of tuples on the page, we have to
assume it's because an earlier vacuum calculated a higher OldestXmin value,
and all the tuples really are visible to everyone.
We have received several reports of this bug, with the "PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag
was incorrectly set in relation ..." warning appearing in logs. We were
finally able to hunt it down with David Gould's help to run extra diagnostics
in an environment where this happened frequently.
Also reword the warning, per Robert Haas' suggestion, to not imply that the
PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag is necessarily at fault, as it might also be a symptom
of corruption on a tuple header.
Backpatch to 8.4, where the PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag was introduced.
Standby optionally sends back information about oldestXmin of queries
which is then checked and applied to the WALSender's proc->xmin.
GetOldestXmin() is modified slightly to agree with GetSnapshotData(),
so that all backends on primary include WALSender within their snapshots.
Note this does nothing to change the snapshot xmin on either master or
standby. Feedback piggybacks on the standby reply message.
vacuum_defer_cleanup_age is no longer used on standby, though parameter
still exists on primary, since some use cases still exist.
Simon Riggs, review comments from Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
First, avoid scanning the whole ProcArray once we know there
are at least commit_siblings active; second, skip the check
altogether if commit_siblings = 0.
Greg Smith
an old transaction running in the master, and a lot of transactions have
started and finished since, and a WAL-record is written in the gap between
the creating the running-xacts snapshot and WAL-logging it, recovery will fail
with "too many KnownAssignedXids" error. This bug was reported by
Joachim Wieland on Nov 19th.
In the same scenario, when fewer transactions have started so that all the
xids fit in KnownAssignedXids despite the first bug, a more serious bug
arises. We incorrectly initialize the clog code with the oldest still running
transaction, and when we see the WAL record belonging to a transaction with
an XID larger than one that committed already before the checkpoint we're
recovering from, we zero the clog page containing the already committed
transaction, leading to data loss.
In hindsight, trying to track xids in the known-assigned-xids array before
seeing the running-xacts record was too complicated. To fix that, hold
XidGenLock while the running-xacts snapshot is taken and WAL-logged. That
ensures that no transaction can begin or end in that gap, so that in recvoery
we know that the snapshot contains all transactions running at that point in
WAL.
to have different values in different processes of the primary server.
Also put it into the "Streaming Replication" GUC category; it doesn't belong
in "Standby Servers" because you use it on the master not the standby.
In passing also correct guc.c's idea of wal_keep_segments' category.
of requirements and documentation on LogStandbySnapshot(). Fixes
two minor bugs reported by Tom Lane that would lead to an incorrect
snapshot after transaction wraparound. Also fix two other problems
discovered that would give incorrect snapshots in certain cases.
ProcArrayApplyRecoveryInfo() substantially rewritten. Some minor
refactoring of xact_redo_apply() and ExpireTreeKnownAssignedTransactionIds().
confusion with streaming-replication settings. Also, change its default
value to "off", because of concern about executing new and poorly-tested
code during ordinary non-replicating operation. Per discussion.
In passing do some minor editing of related documentation.
and be more tense about the locking requirements for it, to improve performance
in Hot Standby mode. In passing fix a few bugs and improve a number of
comments in the existing HS code.
Simon Riggs, with some editorialization by Tom
to handling of btree delete records mean that all snapshot
conflicts on standby now have a valid, useful latestRemovedXid.
Our earlier approach using LW_EXCLUSIVE was useful when we didnt
always have a valid value, though is no longer useful or necessary.
Asserts added to code path to prove and ensure this is the case.
This will reduce contention and improve performance of larger Hot
Standby servers.
through normal backends. Makes code clearer also, since we
avoid various Assert()s. Performance of snapshots taken
during recovery no longer depends upon number of read-only
backends.
woken by alarm we send SIGUSR1 to all backends requesting that they
check to see if they are blocking Startup process. If so, they throw
ERROR/FATAL as for other conflict resolutions. Deadlock stop gap
removed. max_standby_delay = -1 option removed to prevent deadlock.
Discuss the reasons for the lock type we hold on ProcArrayLock while deriving
the conflict list. Cover the idea of false positive conflicts and seemingly
strange effects on snapshot derivation.
Conflict reason is passed through directly to the backend, so we can
take decisions about the effect of the conflict based upon the local
state. No specific changes, as yet, though this prepares for later work.
CancelVirtualTransaction() sends signals while holding ProcArrayLock.
Introduce errdetail_abort() to give message detail explaining that the
abort was caused by conflict processing. Remove CONFLICT_MODE states
in favour of using PROCSIG_RECOVERY_CONFLICT states directly, for clarity.
