The postmaster is not supposed to do anything that depends
fundamentally on shared memory contents, because that creates
the risk that a backend crash that trashes shared memory will
take the postmaster down with it, preventing automatic recovery.
In commit 969d7cd43 I lost sight of this principle and coded
AssignPostmasterChildSlot() in such a way that it could fail
or even crash if the shared PMSignalState structure became
corrupted. Remarkably, we've not seen field reports of such
crashes; but I managed to induce one while testing the recent
changes around palloc chunk headers.
To fix, make a semi-duplicative state array inside the postmaster
so that we need consult only local state while choosing a "child
slot" for a new backend. Ensure that other postmaster-executed
routines in pmsignal.c don't have critical dependencies on the
shared state, either. Corruption of PMSignalState might now
lead ReleasePostmasterChildSlot() to conclude that backend X
failed, when actually backend Y was the one that trashed things.
But that doesn't matter, because we'll force a cluster-wide reset
regardless.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since this is an old bug.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3436789.1665187055@sss.pgh.pa.us
Various bits of code were declaring signal handlers manually,
using "int signum" or variants of that. We evidently have no
platforms where that's actually wrong, but let's use our
SIGNAL_ARGS macro everywhere anyway. If nothing else, it's
good for finding signal handlers easily.
No need for back-patch, since this is just cosmetic AFAICS.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2684964.1663167995@sss.pgh.pa.us
Up to now, if the DBA issued "pg_ctl stop -m immediate", the message
sent to clients was the same as for a crash-and-restart situation.
This is confusing, not least because the message claims that the
database will soon be up again, something we have no business
predicting.
Improve things so that we can generate distinct messages for the two
cases (and also recognize an ad-hoc SIGQUIT, should somebody try that).
To do that, add a field to pmsignal.c's shared memory data structure
that the postmaster sets just before broadcasting SIGQUIT to its
children. No interlocking seems to be necessary; the intervening
signal-sending and signal-receipt should sufficiently serialize accesses
to the field. Hence, this isn't any riskier than the existing usages
of pmsignal.c.
We might in future extend this idea to improve other
postmaster-to-children signal scenarios, although none of them
currently seem to be as badly overloaded as SIGQUIT.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/559291.1608587013@sss.pgh.pa.us
This is still using the 2.0 version of pg_bsd_indent.
I thought it would be good to commit this separately,
so as to document the differences between 2.0 and 2.1 behavior.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16296.1558103386@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
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open,
so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently
be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling
loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all
the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that.
This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a
bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout,
postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable.
The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method
previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died,
but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe
returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return
true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie).
Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise
WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while
PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to
busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state.
Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and
Florian Pflug.
backend, as far as the postmaster shutdown logic is concerned. That means,
fast shutdown will wait for WAL sender processes to exit before signaling
bgwriter to finish. This avoids race conditions between a base backup stopping
or starting, and bgwriter writing the shutdown checkpoint WAL record. We don't
want e.g the end-of-backup WAL record to be written after the shutdown
checkpoint.
On MacOS X, and apparently also on other BSD-derived systems, attaching
a debugger causes getppid() to return the pid of the debugging process
rather than the actual parent PID. As a result, debugging the
autovacuum launcher, startup process, or WAL sender on such systems
causes it to exit, because the previous coding of PostmasterIsAlive()
detects postmaster death by testing whether getppid() == PostmasterPid.
Work around that behavior by checking the return value of getppid()
more carefully. If it's PostmasterPid, the postmaster must be alive;
if it's 1, assume the postmaster is dead. If it's any other value,
assume we've been debugged and fall through to the less-reliable
kill() test.
Review by Tom Lane.
There is no reason that proc.c should have to get involved in this dirty hack
for letting the postmaster know which children are walsenders. Revert that
file to the way it was, and confine the kluge to pmsignal.c and postmaster.c.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory. We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead. Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft). If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.
The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway. This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.
This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.
Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc. It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.) Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine. Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
than being random pieces of other files. Give bgwriter responsibility
for all checkpoint activity (other than a post-recovery checkpoint);
so this child process absorbs the functionality of the former transient
checkpoint and shutdown subprocesses. While at it, create an actual
include file for postmaster.c, which for some reason never had its own
file before.
Natoli and Bruce Momjian (and some cosmetic fixes from Neil Conway).
Changes:
- remove duplicate signal definitions from pqsignal.h
- replace pqkill() with kill() and redefine kill() in Win32
- use ereport() in place of fprintf() in some error handling in
pqsignal.c
- export pg_queue_signal() and make use of it where necessary
- add a console control handler for Ctrl-C and similar handling
on Win32
- do WaitForSingleObjectEx() in CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() on Win32;
query cancelling should now work on Win32
- various other fixes and cleanups
against the latest shapshot. It also includes the replacement of kill()
with pqkill() and sigsetmask() with pqsigsetmask().
Passes all tests fine on my linux machine once applied. Still doesn't
link completely on Win32 - there are a few things still required. But
much closer than before.
At Bruce's request, I'm goint to write up a README file about the method
of signals delivery chosen and why the others were rejected (basically a
summary of the mailinglist discussions). I'll finish that up once/if the
patch is accepted.
Magnus Hagander
PostmasterPid variable, which gets set (early) in PostmasterMain
getppid would not be the postmaster?
[fork/exec] Implements processCancelRequest by keeping an array of
pid/cancel_key structs in shared mem
[fork/exec] Moves AttachSharedMemoryAndSemaphores call for backends into
SubPostmasterMain
[win32] Implements reaper/waitpid by keeping an arrays of children
pids,handles in postmaster local mem
- this item is largely untested, for reasons which should be
obvious, but appears sound
[win32/all] Added extern for pgpipe in Win32 case, and changed the second
pipe call (which seems to have been missed earlier) to pgpipe
[win32] #define'd ftruncate to chsize in the Win32 case
[win32] PG_USLEEP for Win32 has a misplaced paren. Fixed.
[win32] DLLIMPORT handling for MingW case
Claudio Natoli
