The fallback implementation involves acquiring and releasing a spinlock
variable that is otherwise unreferenced --- not even to the extent of
initializing it. This accidentally fails to fail on platforms where
spinlocks should be initialized to zeroes, but elsewhere it results in
a "stuck spinlock" failure during startup.
I griped about this last July, and put in a hack that worked for gcc
on HPPA, but didn't get around to fixing the general case. Per the
discussion back then, the best thing to do seems to be to initialize
dummy_spinlock in main.c.
There's no really compelling reason to refuse to do these read-only,
non-server-starting options as root, and there's at least one good
reason to allow -C: pg_ctl uses -C to find out the true data directory
location when pointed at a config-only directory. On Windows, this is
done before dropping administrator privileges, which means that pg_ctl
fails for administrators if and only if a config-only layout is used.
Since the root-privilege check is done so early in startup, it's a bit
awkward to check for these switches. Make the somewhat arbitrary
decision that we'll only skip the root check if -C is the first switch.
This is not just to make the code a bit simpler: it also guarantees that
we can't misinterpret a --boot mode switch. (While AuxiliaryProcessMain
doesn't currently recognize any such switch, it might have one in the
future.) This is no particular problem for pg_ctl, and since the whole
behavior is undocumented anyhow, it's not a documentation issue either.
(--describe-config only works as the first switch anyway, so this is
no restriction for that case either.)
Back-patch to 9.2 where pg_ctl first began to use -C.
MauMau, heavily edited by me
Per reports from Andres Freund and Luke Campbell, a server failure during
set_pglocale_pgservice results in a segfault rather than a useful error
message, because the infrastructure needed to use ereport hasn't been
initialized; specifically, MemoryContextInit hasn't been called.
One known cause of this is starting the server in a directory it
doesn't have permission to read.
We could try to prevent set_pglocale_pgservice from using anything that
depends on palloc or elog, but that would be messy, and the odds of future
breakage seem high. Moreover there are other things being called in main.c
that look likely to use palloc or elog too --- perhaps those things
shouldn't be there, but they are there today. The best solution seems to
be to move the call of MemoryContextInit to very early in the backend's
real main() function. I've verified that an elog or ereport occurring
immediately after that is now capable of sending something useful to
stderr.
I also added code to elog.c to print something intelligible rather than
just crashing if MemoryContextInit hasn't created the ErrorContext.
This could happen if MemoryContextInit itself fails (due to malloc
failure), and provides some future-proofing against someone trying to
sneak in new code even earlier in server startup.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Since we've only heard reports of
this type of failure recently, it may be that some recent change has made
it more likely to see a crash of this kind; but it sure looks like it's
broken all the way back.
Previously, lookups of non-existent user names could return "Success";
it will now return "User does not exist" by resetting errno. This also
centralizes the user name lookup code in libpgport.
Report and analysis by Nicolas Marchildon; patch by me
GNU gettext selects a default encoding for the messages it emits in a
platform-specific manner; it uses the Windows ANSI code page on Windows
and follows LC_CTYPE on other platforms. This is inconvenient for
PostgreSQL server processes, so realize consistent cross-platform
behavior by calling bind_textdomain_codeset() on Windows each time we
permanently change LC_CTYPE. This primarily affects SQL_ASCII databases
and processes like the postmaster that do not attach to a database,
making their behavior consistent with PostgreSQL on non-Windows
platforms. Messages from SQL_ASCII databases use the encoding implied
by the database LC_CTYPE, and messages from non-database processes use
LC_CTYPE from the postmaster system environment. PlatformEncoding
becomes unused, so remove it.
Make write_console() prefer WriteConsoleW() to write() regardless of the
encodings in use. In this situation, write() will invariably mishandle
non-ASCII characters.
elog.c has assumed that messages conform to the database encoding.
While usually true, this does not hold for SQL_ASCII and MULE_INTERNAL.
Introduce MessageEncoding to track the actual encoding of message text.
The present consumers are Windows-specific code for converting messages
to UTF16 for use in system interfaces. This fixes the appearance in
Windows event logs and consoles of translated messages from SQL_ASCII
processes like the postmaster. Note that SQL_ASCII inherently disclaims
a strong notion of encoding, so non-ASCII byte sequences interpolated
into messages by %s may yet yield a nonsensical message. MULE_INTERNAL
has similar problems at present, albeit for a different reason: its lack
of libiconv support or a conversion to UTF8.
Consequently, one need no longer restart Windows with a different
Windows ANSI code page to broadly test backend logging under a given
language. Changing the user's locale ("Format") is enough. Several
accounts can simultaneously run postmasters under different locales, all
correctly logging localized messages to Windows event logs and consoles.
Alexander Law and Noah Misch
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
We had two copies of this function in the backend and libpq, which was
already pretty bogus, but it turns out that we need it in some other
programs that don't use libpq (such as pg_test_fsync). So put it where
it probably should have been all along. The signal-mask-initialization
support in src/backend/libpq/pqsignal.c stays where it is, though, since
we only need that in the backend.
There was a wild mix of calling conventions: Some were declared to
return void and didn't return, some returned an int exit code, some
claimed to return an exit code, which the callers checked, but
actually never returned, and so on.
Now all of these functions are declared to return void and decorated
with attribute noreturn and don't return. That's easiest, and most
code already worked that way.
Before, some places didn't document the short options (-? and -V),
some documented both, some documented nothing, and they were listed in
various orders. Now this is hopefully more consistent and complete.
Remove the following ports:
- dgux
- nextstep
- sunos4
- svr4
- ultrix4
- univel
These are obsolete and not worth rescuing. In most cases, there is
circumstantial evidence that they wouldn't work anymore anyway.
Add support for collecting "minidump" style crash dumps on
Windows, by setting up an exception handling filter. Crash
dumps will be generated in PGDATA/crashdumps if the directory
is created (the existance of the directory is used as on/off
switch for the generation of the dumps).
Craig Ringer and Magnus Hagander
These comments were not updated when we added the EXEC_BACKEND
mechanism for Windows, even though it rendered them inaccurate.
Also unify two unnecessarily-separate #ifdef __alpha code blocks.
an optarg). Add some comments noting that code in three different files has
to be kept in sync. Fix erroneous description of -S switch (it sets work_mem
not silent_mode), and do some light copy-editing elsewhere in postgres-ref.
it later. This fixes a problem where EXEC_BACKEND didn't have progname
set, causing a segfault if log_min_messages was set below debug2 and our
own snprintf.c was being used.
Also alway strdup() progname.
Backpatch to 8.1.X and 8.0.X.
setup. This protects against undesired changes in locale behavior
if someone carelessly does setlocale(LC_ALL, "") (and we know who
you are, perl guys).
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.