This is advantageous because the BG writer is alive until much later in
the shutdown sequence than WAL writer; we want to make sure that it's
possible to shut off synchronous replication during a smart shutdown,
else it might not be possible to complete the shutdown at all.
Per very reasonable gripes from Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs.
1. Don't ignore query cancel interrupts. Instead, if the user asks to
cancel the query after we've already committed it, but before it's on
the standby, just emit a warning and let the COMMIT finish.
2. Don't ignore die interrupts (pg_terminate_backend or fast shutdown).
Instead, emit a warning message and close the connection without
acknowledging the commit. Other backends will still see the effect of
the commit, but there's no getting around that; it's too late to abort
at this point, and ignoring die interrupts altogether doesn't seem like
a good idea.
3. If synchronous_standby_names becomes empty, wake up all backends
waiting for synchronous replication to complete. Without this, someone
attempting to shut synchronous replication off could easily wedge the
entire system instead.
4. Avoid depending on the assumption that if a walsender updates
MyProc->syncRepState, we'll see the change even if we read it without
holding the lock. The window for this appears to be quite narrow (and
probably doesn't exist at all on machines with strong memory ordering)
but protecting against it is practically free, so do that.
5. Remove useless state SYNC_REP_MUST_DISCONNECT, which isn't needed and
doesn't actually do anything.
There's still some further work needed here to make the behavior of fast
shutdown plausible, but that looks complex, so I'm leaving it for a
separate commit. Review by Fujii Masao.
It's not a good idea to kill the postmaster just because someone muffs
this, and it's not consistent with what we do for other, similar GUCs.
Fujii Masao, with a bit more hacking by me
SyncRepRequested() must check not only the value of the
synchronous_replication GUC but also whether max_wal_senders > 0.
Otherwise, we might end up waiting for sync rep even when there's no
possibility of a standby ever managing to connect. There are some
existing cross-checks to prevent this, but they're not quite sufficient:
the user can start the server with max_wal_senders=0,
synchronous_standby_names='', and synchronous_replication=off and then
subsequent make synchronous_standby_names not empty using pg_ctl reload,
and then SET synchronous_standby=on, leading to an indefinite hang.
Along the way, rename the global variable for the synchronous_replication
GUC to match the name of the GUC itself, for clarity.
Report by Fujii Masao, though I didn't use his patch.
