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10b9af3ebb
There's a project policy against using plain "char buf[BLCKSZ]" local or static variables as page buffers; preferred style is to palloc or malloc each buffer to ensure it is MAXALIGN'd. However, that policy's been ignored in an increasing number of places. We've apparently got away with it so far, probably because (a) relatively few people use platforms on which misalignment causes core dumps and/or (b) the variables chance to be sufficiently aligned anyway. But this is not something to rely on. Moreover, even if we don't get a core dump, we might be paying a lot of cycles for misaligned accesses. To fix, invent new union types PGAlignedBlock and PGAlignedXLogBlock that the compiler must allocate with sufficient alignment, and use those in place of plain char arrays. I used these types even for variables where there's no risk of a misaligned access, since ensuring proper alignment should make kernel data transfers faster. I also changed some places where we had been palloc'ing short-lived buffers, for coding style uniformity and to save palloc/pfree overhead. Since this seems to be a live portability hazard (despite the lack of field reports), back-patch to all supported versions. Patch by me; thanks to Michael Paquier for review. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1535618100.1286.3.camel@credativ.de
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.