At the time replacement_sort_tuples was introduced, there were still
cases where replacement selection sort noticeably outperformed using
quicksort even for the first run. However, those cases seem to have
evaporated as a result of further improvements made since that time
(and perhaps also advances in CPU technology). So remove replacement
selection and the controlling GUC entirely. This makes tuplesort.c
noticeably simpler and probably paves the way for further
optimizations someone might want to do later.
Peter Geoghegan, with review and testing by Tomas Vondra and me.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzmmNjG_K0R9nqYwMq3zjyJJK+hCbiZYNGhAy-Zyjs64GQ@mail.gmail.com
Tuples can have type RECORDOID and a typmod number that identifies a blessed
TupleDesc in a backend-private cache. To support the sharing of such tuples
through shared memory and temporary files, provide a typmod registry in
shared memory.
To achieve that, introduce per-session DSM segments, created on demand when a
backend first runs a parallel query. The per-session DSM segment has a
table-of-contents just like the per-query DSM segment, and initially the
contents are a shared record typmod registry and a DSA area to provide the
space it needs to grow.
State relating to the current session is accessed via a Session object
reached through global variable CurrentSession that may require significant
redesign further down the road as we figure out what else needs to be shared
or remodelled.
Author: Thomas Munro
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
Traditionally, "pg_ctl start -w" has waited for the server to become
ready to accept connections by attempting a connection once per second.
That has the major problem that connection issues (for instance, a
kernel packet filter blocking traffic) can't be reliably told apart
from server startup issues, and the minor problem that if server startup
isn't quick, we accumulate "the database system is starting up" spam
in the server log. We've hacked around many of the possible connection
issues, but it resulted in ugly and complicated code in pg_ctl.c.
In commit c61559ec3, I changed the probe rate to every tenth of a second.
That prompted Jeff Janes to complain that the log-spam problem had become
much worse. In the ensuing discussion, Andres Freund pointed out that
we could dispense with connection attempts altogether if the postmaster
were changed to report its status in postmaster.pid, which "pg_ctl start"
already relies on being able to read. This patch implements that, teaching
postmaster.c to report a status string into the pidfile at the same
state-change points already identified as being of interest for systemd
status reporting (cf commit 7d17e683f). pg_ctl no longer needs to link
with libpq at all; all its functions now depend on reading server files.
In support of this, teach AddToDataDirLockFile() to allow addition of
postmaster.pid lines in not-necessarily-sequential order. This is needed
on Windows where the SHMEM_KEY line will never be written at all. We still
have the restriction that we don't want to truncate the pidfile; document
the reasons for that a bit better.
Also, fix the pg_ctl TAP tests so they'll notice if "start -w" mode
is broken --- before, they'd just wait out the sixty seconds until
the loop gives up, and then report success anyway. (Yes, I found that
out the hard way.)
While at it, arrange for pg_ctl to not need to #include miscadmin.h;
as a rather low-level backend header, requiring that to be compilable
client-side is pretty dubious. This requires moving the #define's
associated with the pidfile into a new header file, and moving
PG_BACKEND_VERSIONSTR someplace else. For lack of a clearly better
"someplace else", I put it into port.h, beside the declaration of
find_other_exec(), since most users of that macro are passing the value to
find_other_exec(). (initdb still depends on miscadmin.h, but at least
pg_ctl and pg_upgrade no longer do.)
In passing, fix main.c so that PG_BACKEND_VERSIONSTR actually defines the
output of "postgres -V", which remarkably it had never done before.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAMkU=1xJW8e+CTotojOMBd-yzUvD0e_JZu2xHo=MnuZ4__m7Pg@mail.gmail.com
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
load_libraries(), which processes the various xxx_preload_libraries GUCs,
was parsing them using SplitIdentifierString() which isn't really
appropriate for values that could be path names: it downcases unquoted
text, and it doesn't allow embedded whitespace unless quoted.
Use SplitDirectoriesString() instead. That also allows us to simplify
load_libraries() a bit, since canonicalize_path() is now done for it.
While this definitely seems like a bug fix, it has the potential to
break configuration settings that accidentally worked before because
of the downcasing behavior. Also, there's an easy workaround for the
bug, namely to double-quote troublesome text. Hence, no back-patch.
QL Zhuo, tweaked a bit by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAB-oJtxHVDc3H+Km3CjB9mY1VDzuyaVH_ZYSz7iXcRqCtb93Ew@mail.gmail.com
Because walsender and normal backends share the same main loop it's
problematic to have two different flag variables, set in signal
handlers, indicating a pending configuration reload. Only certain
walsender commands reach code paths checking for the
variable (START_[LOGICAL_]REPLICATION, CREATE_REPLICATION_SLOT
... LOGICAL, notably not base backups).
This is a bug present since the introduction of walsender, but has
gotten worse in releases since then which allow walsender to do more.
A later patch, not slated for v10, will similarly unify SIGHUP
handling in other types of processes as well.
Author: Petr Jelinek, Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170423235941.qosiuoyqprq4nu7v@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.2-, bug is present since 9.0
Previously, auxiliary processes and background workers not connected
to a database (such as the logical replication launcher) weren't
shown. Include them, so that we can see the associated wait state
information. Add a new column to identify the processes type, so that
people can filter them out easily using SQL if they wish.
Before this patch was written, there was discussion about whether we
should expose this information in a separate view, so as to avoid
contaminating pg_stat_activity with things people might not want to
see. But putting everything in pg_stat_activity was a more popular
choice, so that's what the patch does.
Kuntal Ghosh, reviewed by Amit Langote and Michael Paquier. Some
revisions and bug fixes by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYES5nhkEGw9nZXU8_FhA8XEm8NTm3-SO+3ML1B81Hkww@mail.gmail.com
Previous commits, notably 53be0b1add and
6f3bd98ebf, made it possible to see from
pg_stat_activity when a backend was stuck waiting for another backend,
but it's also fairly common for a backend to be stuck waiting for an
I/O. Add wait events for those operations, too.
Rushabh Lathia, with further hacking by me. Reviewed and tested by
Michael Paquier, Amit Kapila, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, and Rahila Syed.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAGPqQf0LsYHXREPAZqYGVkDqHSyjf=KsD=k0GTVPAuzyThh-VQ@mail.gmail.com
c.h #includes a number of core libc header files, such as <stdio.h>.
There's no point in re-including these after having read postgres.h,
postgres_fe.h, or c.h; so remove code that did so.
While at it, also fix some places that were ignoring our standard pattern
of "include postgres[_fe].h, then system header files, then other Postgres
header files". While there's not any great magic in doing it that way
rather than system headers last, it's silly to have just a few files
deviating from the general pattern. (But I didn't attempt to enforce this
globally, only in files I was touching anyway.)
I'd be the first to say that this is mostly compulsive neatnik-ism,
but over time it might save enough compile cycles to be useful.
Doing so doesn't seem to be within the purpose of the per user
connection limits, and has particularly unfortunate effects in
conjunction with parallel queries.
Backpatch to 9.6 where parallel queries were introduced.
David Rowley, reviewed by Robert Haas and Albe Laurenz.
Commit b460f5d669 -- at my suggestion --
increased the default value of max_worker_processes from 8 to 16, on
the theory that this would be harmless and convenient for users.
Unfortunately, this caused some buildfarm machines with low connection
limits to start failing, so apparently it's not harmless after all.
This adds a new routine, pg_strong_random() for generating random bytes,
for use in both frontend and backend. At the moment, it's only used in
the backend, but the upcoming SCRAM authentication patches need strong
random numbers in libpq as well.
pg_strong_random() is based on, and replaces, the existing implementation
in pgcrypto. It can acquire strong random numbers from a number of sources,
depending on what's available:
- OpenSSL RAND_bytes(), if built with OpenSSL
- On Windows, the native cryptographic functions are used
- /dev/urandom
Unlike the current pgcrypto function, the source is chosen by configure.
That makes it easier to test different implementations, and ensures that
we don't accidentally fall back to a less secure implementation, if the
primary source fails. All of those methods are quite reliable, it would be
pretty surprising for them to fail, so we'd rather find out by failing
hard.
If no strong random source is available, we fall back to using erand48(),
seeded from current timestamp, like PostmasterRandom() was. That isn't
cryptographically secure, but allows us to still work on platforms that
don't have any of the above stronger sources. Because it's not very secure,
the built-in implementation is only used if explicitly requested with
--disable-strong-random.
This replaces the more complicated Fortuna algorithm we used to have in
pgcrypto, which is unfortunate, but all modern platforms have /dev/urandom,
so it doesn't seem worth the maintenance effort to keep that. pgcrypto
functions that require strong random numbers will be disabled with
--disable-strong-random.
Original patch by Magnus Hagander, tons of further work by Michael Paquier
and me.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRy3krN8quR9XujMVVHYtXJ0_60nqgVc6oUk8ygyVkZsA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRWkNYRRPJA7-cF+LfroYV10pvjdz6GNvxk-Eee9FypKA@mail.gmail.com
Increase the default value of the existing max_worker_processes GUC
from 8 to 16, and add a new max_parallel_workers GUC with a maximum
of 8. This way, even if the maximum amount of parallel query is
happening, there is still room for background workers that do other
things, as originally envisioned when max_worker_processes was added.
Julien Rouhaud, reviewed by Amit Kapila and by revised by me.
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
This is a good bit more complicated than the average new-version stamping
commit, because it includes various adjustments in pursuit of changing
from three-part to two-part version numbers. It's likely some further
work will be needed around that change; but this is enough to get through
the regression tests, at least in Unix builds.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
Transmit the leader's temp-namespace state to workers. This is important
because without it, the workers do not really have the same search path
as the leader. For example, there is no good reason (and no extant code
either) to prevent a worker from executing a temp function that the
leader created previously; but as things stood it would fail to find the
temp function, and then either fail or execute the wrong function entirely.
We still prohibit a worker from creating a temp namespace on its own.
In effect, a worker can only see the session's temp namespace if the leader
had created it before starting the worker, which seems like the right
semantics.
Also, transmit the leader's BackendId to workers, and arrange for workers
to use that when determining the physical file path of a temp relation
belonging to their session. While the original intent was to prevent such
accesses entirely, there were a number of holes in that, notably in places
like dbsize.c which assume they can safely access temp rels of other
sessions anyway. We might as well get this right, as a small down payment
on someday allowing workers to access the leader's temp tables. (With
this change, directly using "MyBackendId" as a relation or buffer backend
ID is deprecated; you should use BackendIdForTempRelations() instead.
I left a couple of such uses alone though, as they're not going to be
reachable in parallel workers until we do something about localbuf.c.)
Move the thou-shalt-not-access-thy-leader's-temp-tables prohibition down
into localbuf.c, which is where it actually matters, instead of having it
in relation_open(). This amounts to recognizing that access to temp
tables' catalog entries is perfectly safe in a worker, it's only the data
in local buffers that is problematic.
Having done all that, we can get rid of the test in has_parallel_hazard()
that says that use of a temp table's rowtype is unsafe in parallel workers.
That test was unduly expensive, and if we really did need such a
prohibition, that was not even close to being a bulletproof guard for it.
(For example, any user-defined function executed in a parallel worker
might have attempted such access.)
We still use replacement selection for the first run of the sort only
and only when the number of tuples is relatively small. Otherwise,
the first run, and subsequent runs in all cases, are produced using
quicksort. This tends to be faster except perhaps for very small
amounts of working memory.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by Tomas Vondra, Jeff Janes, Mithun Cy,
Greg Stark, and me.
Commit ac1d794 ("Make idle backends exit if the postmaster dies.")
introduced a regression on, at least, large linux systems. Constantly
adding the same postmaster_alive_fds to the OSs internal datastructures
for implementing poll/select can cause significant contention; leading
to a performance regression of nearly 3x in one example.
This can be avoided by using e.g. linux' epoll, which avoids having to
add/remove file descriptors to the wait datastructures at a high rate.
Unfortunately the current latch interface makes it hard to allocate any
persistent per-backend resources.
Replace, with a backward compatibility layer, WaitLatchOrSocket with a
new WaitEventSet API. Users can allocate such a Set across multiple
calls, and add more than one file-descriptor to wait on. The latter has
been added because there's upcoming postgres features where that will be
helpful.
In addition to the previously existing poll(2), select(2),
WaitForMultipleObjects() implementations also provide an epoll_wait(2)
based implementation to address the aforementioned performance
problem. Epoll is only available on linux, but that is the most likely
OS for machines large enough (four sockets) to reproduce the problem.
To actually address the aforementioned regression, create and use a
long-lived WaitEventSet for FE/BE communication. There are additional
places that would benefit from a long-lived set, but that's a task for
another day.
Thanks to Amit Kapila, who helped make the windows code I blindly wrote
actually work.
Reported-By: Dmitry Vasilyev Discussion:
CAB-SwXZh44_2ybvS5Z67p_CDz=XFn4hNAD=CnMEF+QqkXwFrGg@mail.gmail.com20160114143931.GG10941@awork2.anarazel.de
It's harmless, but might confuse readers. Seems to have been introduced
in 6bc8ef0b7f. Back-patch, just to avoid cosmetic cross-branch
differences.
Amit Langote
Historically this message has been emitted at the end of ShutdownXLOG().
That's not an insane place for it in a standalone backend, but in the
postmaster environment we've grown a fair amount of stuff that happens
later, including archiver/walsender shutdown, stats collector shutdown,
etc. Recent buildfarm experimentation showed that on slower machines
there could be many seconds' delay between finishing ShutdownXLOG() and
actual postmaster exit. That's fairly confusing, both for testing
purposes and for DBAs. Hence, move the code that prints this message
into UnlinkLockFiles(), so that it comes out just after we remove the
postmaster's pidfile. That is a more appropriate definition of "is shut
down" from the point of view of "pg_ctl stop", for example. In general,
removing the pidfile should be the last externally-visible action of
either a postmaster or a standalone backend; compare commit
d73d14c271 for instance. So this seems
like a reasonably future-proof approach.
This is a quick hack, due to be reverted when its purpose has been served,
to try to gather information about why some of the buildfarm critters
regularly fail with "postmaster does not shut down" complaints. Maybe they
are just really overloaded, but maybe something else is going on. Hence,
instrument pg_ctl to print the current time when it starts waiting for
postmaster shutdown and when it gives up, and add a lot of logging of the
current time in the server's checkpoint and shutdown code paths.
No attempt has been made to make this pretty. I'm not even totally sure
if it will build on Windows, but we'll soon find out.
The postmaster now checks every minute or so (worst case, at most two
minutes) that postmaster.pid is still there and still contains its own PID.
If not, it performs an immediate shutdown, as though it had received
SIGQUIT.
The original goal behind this change was to ensure that failed buildfarm
runs would get fully cleaned up, even if the test scripts had left a
postmaster running, which is not an infrequent occurrence. When the
buildfarm script removes a test postmaster's $PGDATA directory, its next
check on postmaster.pid will fail and cause it to exit. Previously, manual
intervention was often needed to get rid of such orphaned postmasters,
since they'd block new test postmasters from obtaining the expected socket
address.
However, by checking postmaster.pid and not something else, we can provide
additional robustness: manual removal of postmaster.pid is a frequent DBA
mistake, and now we can at least limit the damage that will ensue if a new
postmaster is started while the old one is still alive.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since we won't get the desired
improvement in buildfarm reliability otherwise.
To allow users to force RLS to always be applied, even for table owners,
add ALTER TABLE .. FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY.
row_security=off overrides FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY, to ensure pg_dump
output is complete (by default).
Also add SECURITY_NOFORCE_RLS context to avoid data corruption when
ALTER TABLE .. FORCE ROW SECURITY is being used. The
SECURITY_NOFORCE_RLS security context is used only during referential
integrity checks and is only considered in check_enable_rls() after we
have already checked that the current user is the owner of the relation
(which should always be the case during referential integrity checks).
Back-patch to 9.5 where RLS was added.
This commit's parent made superfluous the bit's sole usage. Referential
integrity checks have long run as the subject table's owner, and that
now implies RLS bypass. Safe use of the bit was tricky, requiring
strict control over the SQL expressions evaluating therein. Back-patch
to 9.5, where the bit was introduced.
Based on a patch by Stephen Frost.
Commit c9b0cbe98b accidentally broke the
order of operations during postmaster shutdown: it resulted in removing
the per-socket lockfiles after, not before, postmaster.pid. This creates
a race-condition hazard for a new postmaster that's started immediately
after observing that postmaster.pid has disappeared; if it sees the
socket lockfile still present, it will quite properly refuse to start.
This error appears to be the explanation for at least some of the
intermittent buildfarm failures we've seen in the pg_upgrade test.
Another problem, which has been there all along, is that the postmaster
has never bothered to close() its listen sockets, but has just allowed them
to close at process death. This creates a different race condition for an
incoming postmaster: it might be unable to bind to the desired listen
address because the old postmaster is still incumbent. This might explain
some odd failures we've seen in the past, too. (Note: this is not related
to the fact that individual backends don't close their client communication
sockets. That behavior is intentional and is not changed by this patch.)
Fix by adding an on_proc_exit function that closes the postmaster's ports
explicitly, and (in 9.3 and up) reshuffling the responsibility for where
to unlink the Unix socket files. Lock file unlinking can stay where it
is, but teach it to unlink the lock files in reverse order of creation.
The pg_stats view is supposed to be restricted to only show rows
about tables the user can read. However, it sometimes can leak
information which could not otherwise be seen when row level security
is enabled. Fix that by not showing pg_stats rows to users that would
be subject to RLS on the table the row is related to. This is done
by creating/using the newly introduced SQL visible function,
row_security_active().
Along the way, clean up three call sites of check_enable_rls(). The second
argument of that function should only be specified as other than
InvalidOid when we are checking as a different user than the current one,
as in when querying through a view. These sites were passing GetUserId()
instead of InvalidOid, which can cause the function to return incorrect
results if the current user has the BYPASSRLS privilege and row_security
has been set to OFF.
Additionally fix a bug causing RI Trigger error messages to unintentionally
leak information when RLS is enabled, and other minor cleanup and
improvements. Also add WITH (security_barrier) to the definition of pg_stats.
Bumped CATVERSION due to new SQL functions and pg_stats view definition.
Back-patch to 9.5 where RLS was introduced. Reported by Yaroslav.
Patch by Joe Conway and Dean Rasheed with review and input by
Michael Paquier and Stephen Frost.
This formalizes a decision implicit in commit
4ea51cdfe8 and adds clean detection of
affected systems. Vendor updates are available for each such known bug.
Back-patch to 9.5, where the aforementioned commit first appeared.
Free the contexts holding this data after we're done using it, by the
expedient of attaching them to the PostmasterContext which we were
already taking care to delete (and where, indeed, this data used to live
before commits e5e2fc842c and 7c45e3a3c6). This saves a
probably-usually-negligible amount of space per running backend. It also
avoids leaving potentially-security-sensitive data lying around in memory
in processes that don't need it. You'd have to be unusually paranoid to
think that that amounts to a live security bug, so I've not gone so far as
to forcibly zero the memory; but there surely isn't a good reason to keep
this data around.
Arguably this is a memory management bug in the aforementioned commits,
but it doesn't seem important enough to back-patch.
Avoid memory leak from incorrect choice of how to free a StringInfo
(resetStringInfo doesn't do it). Now that pg_split_opts doesn't scribble
on the optstr, mark that as "const" for clarity. Attach the commentary in
protocol.sgml to the right place, and add documentation about the
user-visible effects of this change on postgres' -o option and libpq's
PGOPTIONS option.
We should set MyProc->databaseId after acquiring the per-database lock,
not beforehand. The old way risked deadlock against processes trying to
copy or delete the target database, since they would first acquire the lock
and then wait for processes with matching databaseId to exit; that left a
window wherein an incoming process could set its databaseId and then block
on the lock, while the other process had the lock and waited in vain for
the incoming process to exit.
CountOtherDBBackends() would time out and fail after 5 seconds, so this
just resulted in an unexpected failure not a permanent lockup, but it's
still annoying when it happens. A real-world example of a use-case is that
short-duration connections to a template database should not cause CREATE
DATABASE to fail.
Doing it in the other order should be fine since the contract has always
been that processes searching the ProcArray for a database ID must hold the
relevant per-database lock while searching. Thus, this actually removes
the former race condition that required an assumption that storing to
MyProc->databaseId is atomic.
It's been like this for a long time, so back-patch to all active branches.
The new type has the scope of whole the database cluster so it doesn't
behave the same as the existing OID alias types which have database
scope,
concerning object dependency. To avoid confusion constants of the new
type are prohibited from appearing where dependencies are made involving
it.
Also, add a note to the docs about possible MVCC violation and
optimization issues, which are general over the all reg* types.
Kyotaro Horiguchi
While a new backend nominally participates in sinval signaling starting
from the SharedInvalBackendInit call near the top of InitPostgres, it
cannot recognize sinval messages for unshared catalogs of its database
until it has set up MyDatabaseId. This is not problematic for the catcache
or relcache, which by definition won't have loaded any data from or about
such catalogs before that point. However, commit 568d4138c6
introduced a mechanism for re-using MVCC snapshots for catalog scans, and
made invalidation of those depend on recognizing relevant sinval messages.
So it's possible to establish a catalog snapshot to read pg_authid and
pg_database, then before we set MyDatabaseId, receive sinval messages that
should result in invalidating that snapshot --- but do not, because we
don't realize they are for our database. This mechanism explains the
intermittent buildfarm failures we've seen since commit 31eae6028e.
That commit was not itself at fault, but it introduced a new regression
test that does reconnections concurrently with the "vacuum full pg_am"
command in vacuum.sql. This allowed the pre-existing error to be exposed,
given just the right timing, because we'd fail to update our information
about how to access pg_am. In principle any VACUUM FULL on a system
catalog could have created a similar hazard for concurrent incoming
connections. Perhaps there are more subtle failure cases as well.
To fix, force invalidation of the catalog snapshot as soon as we've
set MyDatabaseId.
Back-patch to 9.4 where the error was introduced.
Deadlock checking was performed inside signal handlers up to
now. While it's a remarkable feat to have made this work reliably,
it's quite complex to understand why that is the case. Partially it
worked due to the assumption that semaphores are signal safe - which
is not actually documented to be the case for sysv semaphores.
The reason we had to rely on performing this work inside signal
handlers is that semaphores aren't guaranteed to be interruptable by
signals on all platforms. But now that latches provide a somewhat
similar API, which actually has the guarantee of being interruptible,
we can avoid doing so.
Signalling between ProcSleep, ProcWakeup, ProcWaitForSignal and
ProcSendSignal is now done using latches. This increases the
likelihood of spurious wakeups. As spurious wakeup already were
possible and aren't likely to be frequent enough to be an actual
problem, this seems acceptable.
This change would allow for further simplification of the deadlock
checking, now that it doesn't have to run in a signal handler. But
even if I were motivated to do so right now, it would still be better
to do that separately. Such a cleanup shouldn't have to be reviewed a
the same time as the more fundamental changes in this commit.
There is one possible usability regression due to this commit. Namely
it is more likely than before that log_lock_waits messages are output
more than once.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
We used to handle authentication_timeout by setting
ImmediateInterruptOK to true during large parts of the authentication
phase of a new connection. While that happens to work acceptably in
practice, it's not particularly nice and has ugly corner cases.
Previous commits converted the FE/BE communication to use latches and
implemented support for interrupt handling during both
send/recv. Building on top of that work we can get rid of
ImmediateInterruptOK during authentication, by immediately treating
timeouts during authentication as a reason to die. As die interrupts
are handled immediately during client communication that provides a
sensibly quick reaction time to authentication timeout.
Additionally add a few CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() to some more complex
authentication methods. More could be added, but this already should
provides a reasonable coverage.
While it this overall increases the maximum time till a timeout is
reacted to, it greatly reduces complexity and increases
reliability. That seems like a overall win. If the increase proves to
be noticeable we can deal with those cases by moving to nonblocking
network code and add interrupt checking there.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Sometimes it's useful for a background worker to be able to initialize
its database connection by OID rather than by name, so provide a way
to do that.
If any error occurred while we were in the middle of reading a protocol
message from the client, we could lose sync, and incorrectly try to
interpret a part of another message as a new protocol message. That will
usually lead to an "invalid frontend message" error that terminates the
connection. However, this is a security issue because an attacker might
be able to deliberately cause an error, inject a Query message in what's
supposed to be just user data, and have the server execute it.
We were quite careful to not have CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls or other
operations that could ereport(ERROR) in the middle of processing a message,
but a query cancel interrupt or statement timeout could nevertheless cause
it to happen. Also, the V2 fastpath and COPY handling were not so careful.
It's very difficult to recover in the V2 COPY protocol, so we will just
terminate the connection on error. In practice, that's what happened
previously anyway, as we lost protocol sync.
To fix, add a new variable in pqcomm.c, PqCommReadingMsg, that is set
whenever we're in the middle of reading a message. When it's set, we cannot
safely ERROR out and continue running, because we might've read only part
of a message. PqCommReadingMsg acts somewhat similarly to critical sections
in that if an error occurs while it's set, the error handler will force the
connection to be terminated, as if the error was FATAL. It's not
implemented by promoting ERROR to FATAL in elog.c, like ERROR is promoted
to PANIC in critical sections, because we want to be able to use
PG_TRY/CATCH to recover and regain protocol sync. pq_getmessage() takes
advantage of that to prevent an OOM error from terminating the connection.
To prevent unnecessary connection terminations, add a holdoff mechanism
similar to HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS() that can be used hold off query cancel
interrupts, but still allow die interrupts. The rules on which interrupts
are processed when are now a bit more complicated, so refactor
ProcessInterrupts() and the calls to it in signal handlers so that the
signal handlers always call it if ImmediateInterruptOK is set, and
ProcessInterrupts() can decide to not do anything if the other conditions
are not met.
Reported by Emil Lenngren. Patch reviewed by Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Security: CVE-2015-0244
To do so, move InitializeLatchSupport() into the new common process
initialization functions, and add a new global variable MyLatch.
MyLatch is usable as soon InitPostmasterChild() has been called
(i.e. very early during startup). Initially it points to a process
local latch that exists in all processes. InitProcess/InitAuxiliaryProcess
then replaces that local latch with PGPROC->procLatch. During shutdown
the reverse happens.
This is primarily advantageous for two reasons: For one it simplifies
dealing with the shared process latch, especially in signal handlers,
because instead of having to check for MyProc, MyLatch can be used
unconditionally. For another, a later patch that makes FEs/BE
communication use latches, now can rely on the existence of a latch,
even before having gone through InitProcess.
Discussion: 20140927191243.GD5423@alap3.anarazel.de
