When a backend process is forked, we initialize the system's random number
generator with srandom(). The seed used is derived from the backend's pid
and the timestamp. However, we only used the microseconds part of the
timestamp, and it was XORed with the pid, so the total range of different
seed values chosen was 0-999999. That's quite limited.
Change the code to also use the seconds part of the timestamp in the seed,
and shift the microseconds so that all 32 bits of the seed are used.
Honza Horak
To wit,
bgworker.c: In function `RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker':
bgworker.c:761: warning: `generation' might be used uninitialized in this function
dsm_impl.c: In function `dsm_impl_op':
dsm_impl.c:197: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
Neither of these represent actual bugs, but we may as well tweak the code
so that more compilers can tell that. This won't change the generated code
on compilers that do recognize that the cases are unreachable.
Although previously-introduced APIs allow the process that registers a
background worker to obtain the worker's PID, there's no way to prevent
a worker that is not currently running from being restarted. This
patch introduces a new API TerminateBackgroundWorker() that prevents
the background worker from being restarted, terminates it if it is
currently running, and causes it to be unregistered if or when it is
not running.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and KaiGai Kohei.
Add asprintf(), pg_asprintf(), and psprintf() to simplify string
allocation and composition. Replacement implementations taken from
NetBSD.
Reviewed-by: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Reviewed-by: Asif Naeem <anaeem.it@gmail.com>
Clamp the minimum sleep time during immediate shutdown or crash to a
minimum of zero, not a maximum of one second. The previous code could
result in a negative sleep time, leading to failure in select() calls.
Also, on crash recovery, reset AbortStartTime as soon as SIGKILL is sent
or abort processing has commenced instead of waiting until the startup
process completes. Reset AbortStartTime as soon as SIGKILL is sent,
too, to avoid doing that repeatedly.
Per trouble report from Jeff Janes on
CAMkU=1xd3=wFqZwwuXPWe4BQs3h1seYo8LV9JtSjW5RodoPxMg@mail.gmail.com
Author: MauMau
It seems to make more sense to use "cutoff multixact" terminology
throughout the backend code; "freeze" is associated with replacing of an
Xid with FrozenTransactionId, which is not what we do for MultiXactIds.
Andres Freund
Some adjustments by Álvaro Herrera
Using the infrastructure provided by this patch, it's possible either
to wait for the startup of a dynamically-registered background worker,
or to poll the status of such a worker without waiting. In either
case, the current PID of the worker process can also be obtained.
As usual, worker_spi is updated to demonstrate the new functionality.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund.
Instead of deleting all files in stats_temp_directory and the permanent
directory on a crash, only remove those files that match the pattern of
files we actually write in them, to avoid possibly clobbering existing
unrelated contents of the temporary directory. Per complaint from Jeff
Janes, and subsequent discussion, starting at message
CAMkU=1z9+7RsDODnT4=cDFBRBp8wYQbd_qsLcMtKEf-oFwuOdQ@mail.gmail.com
Also, fix a bug in the same routine to avoid removing files from the
permanent directory twice (instead of once from that directory and then
from the temporary directory), also per report from Jeff Janes, in
message
CAMkU=1wbk947=-pAosDMX5VC+sQw9W4ttq6RM9rXu=MjNeEQKA@mail.gmail.com
We've seen multiple cases of people looking at the postmaster's original
stderr output to try to diagnose problems, not realizing/remembering that
their logging configuration is set up to send log messages somewhere else.
This seems particularly likely to happen in prepackaged distributions,
since many packagers patch the code to change the factory-standard logging
configuration to something more in line with their platform conventions.
In hopes of reducing confusion, emit a LOG message about this at the point
in startup where we are about to switch log output away from the original
stderr, providing a pointer to where to look instead. This message will
appear as the last thing in the original stderr output. (We might later
also try to emit such link messages when logging parameters are changed
on-the-fly; but that case seems to be both noticeably harder to do nicely,
and much less frequently a problem in practice.)
Per discussion, back-patch to 9.3 but not further.
In PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state, checkpointer process must be dead already.
But an immediate shutdown could make postmaster's state machine
transition to PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state even if checkpointer process is
still running, and which caused assertion failure. This bug was introduced
in commit 457d6cf049.
This patch ensures that postmaster's state machine doesn't transition to
PM_WAIT_DEAD_END state in an immediate shutdown while checkpointer
process is running.
Previously one had to use slist_delete(), implying an additional scan of
the list, making this infrastructure considerably less efficient than
traditional Lists when deletion of element(s) in a long list is needed.
Modify the slist_foreach_modify() macro to support deleting the current
element in O(1) time, by keeping a "prev" pointer in addition to "cur"
and "next". Although this makes iteration with this macro a bit slower,
no real harm is done, since in any scenario where you're not going to
delete the current list element you might as well just use slist_foreach
instead. Improve the comments about when to use each macro.
Back-patch to 9.3 so that we'll have consistent semantics in all branches
that provide ilist.h. Note this is an ABI break for callers of
slist_foreach_modify().
Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Per discussion on pgsql-hackers, these aren't really needed. Interim
versions of the background worker patch had the worker starting with
signals already unblocked, which would have made this necessary.
But the final version does not, so we don't really need it; and it
doesn't work well with the new facility for starting dynamic background
workers, so just rip it out.
Also per discussion on pgsql-hackers, back-patch this change to 9.3.
It's best to get the API break out of the way before we do an
official release of this facility, to avoid more pain for extension
authors later.
There is a new API, RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker, which allows
an ordinary user backend to register a new background writer during
normal running. This means that it's no longer necessary for all
background workers to be registered during processing of
shared_preload_libraries, although the option of registering workers
at that time remains available.
When a background worker exits and will not be restarted, the
slot previously used by that background worker is automatically
released and becomes available for reuse. Slots used by background
workers that are configured for automatic restart can't (yet) be
released without shutting down the system.
This commit adds a new source file, bgworker.c, and moves some
of the existing control logic for background workers there.
Previously, there was little enough logic that it made sense to
keep everything in postmaster.c, but not any more.
This commit also makes the worker_spi contrib module into an
extension and adds a new function, worker_spi_launch, which can
be used to demonstrate the new facility.
In 9.3, there's no particular limit on the number of bgworkers;
instead, we just count up the number that are actually registered,
and use that to set MaxBackends. However, that approach causes
problems for Hot Standby, which needs both MaxBackends and the
size of the lock table to be the same on the standby as on the
master, yet it may not be desirable to run the same bgworkers in
both places. 9.3 handles that by failing to notice the problem,
which will probably work fine in nearly all cases anyway, but is
not theoretically sound.
A further problem with simply counting the number of registered
workers is that new workers can't be registered without a
postmaster restart. This is inconvenient for administrators,
since bouncing the postmaster causes an interruption of service.
Moreover, there are a number of applications for background
processes where, by necessity, the background process must be
started on the fly (e.g. parallel query). While this patch
doesn't actually make it possible to register new background
workers after startup time, it's a necessary prerequisite.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier.
In patch 82233ce7ea, AbortStartTime wasn't being reset appropriately
after the restart sequence, causing subsequent iterations through
ServerLoop to malfunction.
SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
versions of the row. In many cases, we work around this by requiring
DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
failures occur as a result. This commit doesn't change anything
related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
strength reductions in the future.
The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow. However, testing
of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
severe except under fairly extreme workloads. To mitigate those
problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
been processed. The catcache machinery already requires that
invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
than scanning the catalog at all. Thus, making snapshot reuse
dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
already subtly broken.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
On immediate shutdown, or during a restart-after-crash sequence,
postmaster used to send SIGQUIT (and then abandon ship if shutdown); but
this is not a good strategy if backends don't die because of that
signal. (This might happen, for example, if a backend gets tangled
trying to malloc() due to gettext(), as in an example illustrated by
MauMau.) This causes problems when later trying to restart the server,
because some processes are still attached to the shared memory segment.
Instead of just abandoning such backends to their fates, we now have
postmaster hang around for a little while longer, send a SIGKILL after
some reasonable waiting period, and then exit. This makes immediate
shutdown more reliable.
There is disagreement on whether it's best for postmaster to exit after
sending SIGKILL, or to stick around until all children have reported
death. If this controversy is resolved differently than what this patch
implements, it's an easy change to make.
Bug reported by MauMau in message 20DAEA8949EC4E2289C6E8E58560DEC0@maumau
MauMau and Álvaro Herrera
Latch activity was not being detected by non-database-connected workers; the
SIGUSR1 signal handler which is normally in charge of that was set to SIG_IGN.
Create a simple handler to call latch_sigusr1_handler instead.
Robert Haas (bug report and suggested fix)
Add a SignalUnconnectedWorkers() call so that non-database-connected background
workers are also notified when postmaster is SIGHUPped. Previously, only
database-connected workers were.
Michael Paquier (bug report and fix)
The point of turning off track_activities is to avoid this reporting
overhead, but a thinko in commit 4f42b546fd
caused pgstat_report_activity() to perform half of its updates anyway.
Fix that, and also make sure that we clear all the now-disabled fields
when transitioning to the non-reporting state.
An oversight in commit e710b65c1c allowed
database names beginning with "-" to be treated as though they were secure
command-line switches; and this switch processing occurs before client
authentication, so that even an unprivileged remote attacker could exploit
the bug, needing only connectivity to the postmaster's port. Assorted
exploits for this are possible, some requiring a valid database login,
some not. The worst known problem is that the "-r" switch can be invoked
to redirect the process's stderr output, so that subsequent error messages
will be appended to any file the server can write. This can for example be
used to corrupt the server's configuration files, so that it will fail when
next restarted. Complete destruction of database tables is also possible.
Fix by keeping the database name extracted from a startup packet fully
separate from command-line switches, as had already been done with the
user name field.
The Postgres project thanks Mitsumasa Kondo for discovering this bug,
Kyotaro Horiguchi for drafting the fix, and Noah Misch for recognizing
the full extent of the danger.
Security: CVE-2013-1899
Previously, if the postmaster initialized OpenSSL's PRNG (which it will do
when ssl=on in postgresql.conf), the same pseudo-random state would be
inherited by each forked child process. The problem is masked to a
considerable extent if the incoming connection uses SSL encryption, but
when it does not, identical pseudo-random state is made available to
functions like contrib/pgcrypto. The process's PID does get mixed into any
requested random output, but on most systems that still only results in 32K
or so distinct random sequences available across all Postgres sessions.
This might allow an attacker who has database access to guess the results
of "secure" operations happening in another session.
To fix, forcibly reset the PRNG after fork(). Each child process that has
need for random numbers from OpenSSL's generator will thereby be forced to
go through OpenSSL's normal initialization sequence, which should provide
much greater variability of the sequences. There are other ways we might
do this that would be slightly cheaper, but this approach seems the most
future-proof against SSL-related code changes.
This has been assigned CVE-2013-1900, but since the issue and the patch
have already been publicized on pgsql-hackers, there's no point in trying
to hide this commit.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Marko Kreen
This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.
In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.
Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
A materialized view has a rule just like a view and a heap and
other physical properties like a table. The rule is only used to
populate the table, references in queries refer to the
materialized data.
This is a minimal implementation, but should still be useful in
many cases. Currently data is only populated "on demand" by the
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW and REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW statements.
It is expected that future releases will add incremental updates
with various timings, and that a more refined concept of defining
what is "fresh" data will be developed. At some point it may even
be possible to have queries use a materialized in place of
references to underlying tables, but that requires the other
above-mentioned features to be working first.
Much of the documentation work by Robert Haas.
Review by Noah Misch, Thom Brown, Robert Haas, Marko Tiikkaja
Security review by KaiGai Kohei, with a decision on how best to
implement sepgsql still pending.
We now write one file per database and one global file, instead of
having the whole thing in a single huge file. This reduces the I/O that
must be done when partial data is required -- which is all the time,
because each process only needs information on its own database anyway.
Also, the autovacuum launcher does not need data about tables and
functions in each database; having the global stats for all DBs is
enough.
Catalog version bumped because we have a new subdir under PGDATA.
Author: Tomas Vondra. Some rework by Álvaro
Testing by Jeff Janes
Other discussion by Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane.
Normally, we suppress sending a tabstats message to the collector unless
there were some actual table stats to send. However, during backend exit
we should force out the message if there are any transaction commit/abort
counts to send, else the session's last few commit/abort counts will never
get reported at all. We had logic for this, but the short-circuit test
at the top of pgstat_report_stat() ignored the "force" flag, with the
consequence that session-ending transactions that touched no database-local
tables would not get counted. Seems to be an oversight in my commit
641912b4d1, which added the "force" flag.
That was back in 8.3, so back-patch to all supported versions.
When we eliminated "unnecessary" wakeups of the syslogger process, we
broke size-based logfile rotation on Windows, because on that platform
data transfer is done in a separate thread. While non-Windows platforms
would recheck the output file size after every log message, Windows only
did so when the control thread woke up for some other reason, which might
be quite infrequent. Per bug #7814 from Tsunezumi. Back-patch to 9.2
where the problem was introduced.
Jeff Janes
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE". These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE". UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.
Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.
The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid. Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates. This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed. pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.
Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header. This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.
Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)
With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.
As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.
Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane. There's probably room for several more tests.
There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it. Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
Commit da07a1e8 was broken for EXEC_BACKEND because I failed to realize
that the MaxBackends recomputation needed to be duplicated by
subprocesses in SubPostmasterMain. However, instead of having the value
be recomputed at all, it's better to assign the correct value at
postmaster initialization time, and have it be propagated to exec'ed
backends via BackendParameters.
MaxBackends stays as zero until after modules in
shared_preload_libraries have had a chance to register bgworkers, since
the value is going to be untrustworthy till that's finished.
Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
We used to set it to the current recovery target timeline, but the recovery
target timeline can change during recovery, leaving ThisTimeLineID at an
old value. That seems worse than always leaving it at zero to begin with.
AFAICS there was no good reason to set it in the first place. ThisTimeLineID
is not needed in checkpointer or bgwriter process, until it's time to write
the end-of-recovery checkpoint, and at that point ThisTimeLineID is updated
anyway.
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Fujii Masao
Kevin Grittner