This introduces a bump MemoryContext type. The bump context is best
suited for short-lived memory contexts which require only allocations
of memory and never a pfree or repalloc, which are unsupported.
Memory palloc'd into a bump context has no chunk header. This makes
bump a useful context type when lots of small allocations need to be
done without any need to pfree those allocations. Allocation sizes are
rounded up to the next MAXALIGN boundary, so with this and no chunk
header, allocations are very compact indeed.
Allocations are also very fast as bump does not check any freelists to
try and make use of previously free'd chunks. It just checks if there
is enough room on the current block, and if so it bumps the freeptr
beyond this chunk and returns the value that the freeptr was previously
pointing to. Simple and fast. A new block is malloc'd when there's not
enough space in the current block.
Code using the bump allocator must take care never to call any functions
which could try to call realloc() (or variants), pfree(),
GetMemoryChunkContext() or GetMemoryChunkSpace() on a bump allocated
chunk. Due to lack of chunk headers, these operations are unsupported.
To increase the chances of catching such issues, when compiled with
MEMORY_CONTEXT_CHECKING, bump allocated chunks are given a header and
any attempt to perform an unsupported operation will result in an ERROR.
Without MEMORY_CONTEXT_CHECKING, code attempting an unsupported
operation could result in a segfault.
A follow-on commit will implement the first user of bump.
Author: David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Nathan Bossart
Reviewed-by: Matthias van de Meent
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvqGSpCU95TmM=Bp=6xjL_nLys4zdZOpfNyWBk97Xrdj2w@mail.gmail.com
This introduces palloc_aligned() and MemoryContextAllocAligned() which
allow callers to obtain memory which is allocated to the given size and
also aligned to the specified alignment boundary. The alignment
boundaries may be any power-of-2 value. Currently, the alignment is
capped at 2^26, however, we don't expect values anything like that large.
The primary expected use case is to align allocations to perhaps CPU
cache line size or to maybe I/O page size. Certain use cases can benefit
from having aligned memory by either having better performance or more
predictable performance.
The alignment is achieved by requesting 'alignto' additional bytes from
the underlying allocator function and then aligning the address that is
returned to the requested alignment. This obviously does waste some
memory, so alignments should be kept as small as what is required.
It's also important to note that these alignment bytes eat into the
maximum allocation size. So something like:
palloc_aligned(MaxAllocSize, 64, 0);
will not work as we cannot request MaxAllocSize + 64 bytes.
Additionally, because we're just requesting the requested size plus the
alignment requirements from the given MemoryContext, if that context is
the Slab allocator, then since slab can only provide chunks of the size
that's specified when the slab context is created, then this is not going
to work. Slab will generate an error to indicate that the requested size
is not supported.
The alignment that is requested in palloc_aligned() is stored along with
the allocated memory. This allows the alignment to remain intact through
repalloc() calls.
Author: Andres Freund, David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Maxim Orlov, Andres Freund, John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvpxLPUMV1mhxs6g7GNwCP6Cs6hfnYQL5ffJQTuFAuxt8A%40mail.gmail.com
When maintaining or merging patches, one of the most common sources
for conflicts are the list of objects in makefiles. Especially when
the split across lines has been changed on both sides, which is
somewhat common due to attempting to stay below 80 columns, those
conflicts are unnecessarily laborious to resolve.
By splitting, and alphabetically sorting, OBJS style lines into one
object per line, conflicts should be less frequent, and easier to
resolve when they still occur.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191029200901.vww4idgcxv74cwes@alap3.anarazel.de
Add new style of memory allocator, known as Generational
appropriate for use in cases where memory is allocated
and then freed in roughly oldest first order (FIFO).
Use new allocator for logical decoding’s reorderbuffer
to significantly reduce memory usage and improve performance.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Simon Riggs
The default general purpose aset.c style memory context is not a great
choice for allocations that are all going to be evenly sized,
especially when those objects aren't small, and have varying
lifetimes. There tends to be a lot of fragmentation, larger
allocations always directly go to libc rather than have their cost
amortized over several pallocs.
These problems lead to the introduction of ad-hoc slab allocators in
reorderbuffer.c. But it turns out that the simplistic implementation
leads to problems when a lot of objects are allocated and freed, as
aset.c is still the underlying implementation. Especially freeing can
easily run into O(n^2) behavior in aset.c.
While the O(n^2) behavior in aset.c can, and probably will, be
addressed, custom allocators for this behavior are more efficient
both in space and time.
This allocator is for evenly sized allocations, and supports both
cheap allocations and freeing, without fragmenting significantly. It
does so by allocating evenly sized blocks via malloc(), and carves
them into chunks that can be used for allocations. In order to
release blocks to the OS as early as possible, chunks are allocated
from the fullest block that still has free objects, increasing the
likelihood of a block being entirely unused.
A subsequent commit uses this in reorderbuffer.c, but a further
allocator is needed to resolve the performance problems triggering
this work.
There likely are further potentialy uses of this allocator besides
reorderbuffer.c.
There's potential further optimizations of the new slab.c, in
particular the array of freelists could be replaced by a more
intelligent structure - but for now this looks more than good enough.
Author: Tomas Vondra, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Jim Nasby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/d15dff83-0b37-28ed-0809-95a5cc7292ad@2ndquadrant.com
An upcoming patch introduces a new type of memory context. To avoid
duplicating debugging infrastructure within aset.c, move useful pieces
to memdebug.[ch].
While touching aset.c, fix printf format code in AllocFree* debug
macros.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/b3b2245c-b37a-e1e5-ebc4-857c914bc747@2ndquadrant.com
Programmers discovered decades ago that it was useful to have a simple
interface for allocating and freeing memory, which is why malloc() and
free() were invented. Unfortunately, those handy tools don't work
with dynamic shared memory segments because those are specific to
PostgreSQL and are not necessarily mapped at the same address in every
cooperating process. So invent our own allocator instead. This makes
it possible for processes cooperating as part of parallel query
execution to allocate and free chunks of memory without having to
reserve them prior to the start of execution. It could also be used
for longer lived objects; for example, we could consider storing data
for pg_stat_statements or the stats collector in shared memory using
these interfaces, rather than writing them to files. Basically,
anything that needs shared memory but can't predict in advance how
much it's going to need might find this useful.
Thomas Munro and Robert Haas. The original code (of mine) on which
Thomas based his work was actually designed to be a new backend-local
memory allocator for PostgreSQL, but that hasn't gone anywhere - or
not yet, anyway. Thomas took that work and performed major
refactoring and extensive modifications to make it work with dynamic
shared memory, including the addition of appropriate locking.
Discussion: CA+TgmobkeWptGwiNa+SGFWsTLzTzD-CeLz0KcE-y6LFgoUus4A@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: CAEepm=1z5WLuNoJ80PaCvz6EtG9dN0j-KuHcHtU6QEfcPP5-qA@mail.gmail.com
This is intended as infrastructure for a full-fledged allocator for
dynamic shared memory. The interface looks a bit like a real
allocator, but only supports allocating and freeing memory in
multiples of the 4kB page size. Further, to free memory, you must
know the size of the span you wish to free, in pages. While these are
make it unsuitable as an allocator in and of itself, it still serves
as very useful scaffolding for a full-fledged allocator.
Robert Haas and Thomas Munro. This code is mostly the same as my 2014
submission, but Thomas fixed quite a few bugs and made some changes to
the interface.
Discussion: CA+TgmobkeWptGwiNa+SGFWsTLzTzD-CeLz0KcE-y6LFgoUus4A@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: CAEepm=1z5WLuNoJ80PaCvz6EtG9dN0j-KuHcHtU6QEfcPP5-qA@mail.gmail.com
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
Attached you'll find a (big) patch that fixes make dep and make
depend in all Makefiles where I found it to be appropriate.
It also removes the dependency in Makefile.global for NAMEDATALEN
and OIDNAMELEN by making backend/catalog/genbki.sh and bin/initdb/initdb.sh
a little smarter.
This no longer requires initdb.sh that is turned into initdb with
a sed script when installing Postgres, hence initdb.sh should be
renamed to initdb (after the patch has been applied :-) )
This patch is against the 6.3 sources, as it took a while to
complete.
Please review and apply,
Cheers,
Jeroen van Vianen
Makefile.global.
End result, if all goes well, should allow for much easier porting, since
there will no longer be a concept of a "port". Most, if not everything,
*should* be determined by configure, or by the compiler itself. Still
work to be done though :)
David Rowley
Andres Freund
Simon Riggs
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Peter Eisentraut
PostgreSQL Daemon
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Marc G. Fournier
Bryan Henderson