The original coding here insisted that callers manually cancel any prepared
sleep for one condition variable before starting a sleep on another one.
While that's not a huge burden today, it seems like a gotcha that will bite
us in future if the use of condition variables increases; anything we can
do to make the use of this API simpler and more robust is attractive.
Hence, allow these functions to automatically switch their attention to
a different CV when required. This is safe for the same reason it was OK
for commit aced5a92b to let a broadcast operation cancel any prepared CV
sleep: whenever we return to the other test-and-sleep loop, we will
automatically re-prepare that CV, paying at most an extra test of that
loop's exit condition.
Back-patch to v10 where condition variables were introduced. Ordinarily
we would probably not back-patch a change like this, but since it does not
invalidate any coding pattern that was legal before, it seems safe enough.
Furthermore, there's an open bug in replorigin_drop() for which the
simplest fix requires this. Even if we chose to fix that in some more
complicated way, the hazard would remain that we might back-patch some
other bug fix that requires this behavior.
Patch by me, reviewed by Thomas Munro.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2437.1515368316@sss.pgh.pa.us
In the admittedly-very-unlikely case that AddWaitEventToSet fails,
ConditionVariablePrepareToSleep would error out after already having
set cv_sleep_target, which is probably bad, and after having already
set cv_wait_event_set, which is very bad. Transaction abort might or
might not clean up cv_sleep_target properly; but there is nothing
that would be aware that the WaitEventSet wasn't fully constructed,
so that all future condition variable sleeps would be broken.
We can easily guard against these hazards with slight restructuring.
Back-patch to v10 where condition_variable.c was introduced.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0NWKehYw7NDoUSf8juuKOPRnCyY3vuaSvhrEWsOTAa3w@mail.gmail.com
The original implementation of ConditionVariableBroadcast was, per its
self-description, "the dumbest way possible". Thomas Munro found out
it was a bit too dumb. An awakened process may immediately re-queue
itself, if the specific condition it's waiting for is not yet satisfied.
If this happens before ConditionVariableBroadcast is able to see the wait
queue as empty, then ConditionVariableBroadcast will re-awaken the same
process, repeating the cycle. Given unlucky timing this back-and-forth
can repeat indefinitely; loops lasting thousands of seconds have been
seen in testing.
To fix, add our own process to the end of the wait queue to serve as a
sentinel, and exit the broadcast loop once our process is not there
anymore. There are various special considerations described in the
comments, the principal disadvantage being that wakers can no longer
be sure whether they awakened a real waiter or just a sentinel. But in
practice nobody pays attention to the result of ConditionVariableSignal
or ConditionVariableBroadcast anyway, so that problem seems hypothetical.
Back-patch to v10 where condition_variable.c was introduced.
Tom Lane and Thomas Munro
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0NWKehYw7NDoUSf8juuKOPRnCyY3vuaSvhrEWsOTAa3w@mail.gmail.com
The larger part of this patch replaces usages of MyProc->procLatch
with MyLatch. The latter works even early during backend startup,
where MyProc->procLatch doesn't yet. While the affected code
shouldn't run in cases where it's not initialized, it might get copied
into places where it might. Using MyLatch is simpler and a bit faster
to boot, so there's little point to stick with the previous coding.
While doing so I noticed some weaknesses around newly introduced uses
of latches that could lead to missed events, and an omitted
CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() call in worker_spi.
As all the actual bugs are in v10 code, there doesn't seem to be
sufficient reason to backpatch this.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/20170606195321.sjmenrfgl2nu6j63@alap3.anarazel.dehttps://postgr.es/m/20170606210405.sim3yl6vpudhmufo@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: -
Condition variables provide a flexible way to sleep until a
cooperating process causes an arbitrary condition to become true. In
simple cases, this can be accomplished with a WaitLatch/ResetLatch
loop; the cooperating process can call SetLatch after performing work
that might cause the condition to be satisfied, and the waiting
process can recheck the condition each time. However, if the process
performing the work doesn't have an easy way to identify which
processes might be waiting, this doesn't work, because it can't
identify which latches to set. Condition variables solve that problem
by internally maintaining a list of waiters; a process that may have
caused some waiter's condition to be satisfied must "signal" or
"broadcast" on the condition variable.
Robert Haas and Thomas Munro
