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.
Before this patch, streaming replication would refuse to start replicating
if the timeline in the primary doesn't exactly match the standby. The
situation where it doesn't match is when you have a master, and two
standbys, and you promote one of the standbys to become new master.
Promoting bumps up the timeline ID, and after that bump, the other standby
would refuse to continue.
There's significantly more timeline related logic in streaming replication
now. First of all, when a standby connects to primary, it will ask the
primary for any timeline history files that are missing from the standby.
The missing files are sent using a new replication command TIMELINE_HISTORY,
and stored in standby's pg_xlog directory. Using the timeline history files,
the standby can follow the latest timeline present in the primary
(recovery_target_timeline='latest'), just as it can follow new timelines
appearing in an archive directory.
START_REPLICATION now takes a TIMELINE parameter, to specify exactly which
timeline to stream WAL from. This allows the standby to request the primary
to send over WAL that precedes the promotion. The replication protocol is
changed slightly (in a backwards-compatible way although there's little hope
of streaming replication working across major versions anyway), to allow
replication to stop when the end of timeline reached, putting the walsender
back into accepting a replication command.
Many thanks to Amit Kapila for testing and reviewing various versions of
this patch.
Background workers are postmaster subprocesses that run arbitrary
user-specified code. They can request shared memory access as well as
backend database connections; or they can just use plain libpq frontend
database connections.
Modules listed in shared_preload_libraries can register background
workers in their _PG_init() function; this is early enough that it's not
necessary to provide an extra GUC option, because the necessary extra
resources can be allocated early on. Modules can install more than one
bgworker, if necessary.
Care is taken that these extra processes do not interfere with other
postmaster tasks: only one such process is started on each ServerLoop
iteration. This means a large number of them could be waiting to be
started up and postmaster is still able to quickly service external
connection requests. Also, shutdown sequence should not be impacted by
a worker process that's reasonably well behaved (i.e. promptly responds
to termination signals.)
The current implementation lets worker processes specify their start
time, i.e. at what point in the server startup process they are to be
started: right after postmaster start (in which case they mustn't ask
for shared memory access), when consistent state has been reached
(useful during recovery in a HOT standby server), or when recovery has
terminated (i.e. when normal backends are allowed).
In case of a bgworker crash, actions to take depend on registration
data: if shared memory was requested, then all other connections are
taken down (as well as other bgworkers), just like it were a regular
backend crashing. The bgworker itself is restarted, too, within a
configurable timeframe (which can be configured to be never).
More features to add to this framework can be imagined without much
effort, and have been discussed, but this seems good enough as a useful
unit already.
An elementary sample module is supplied.
Author: Álvaro Herrera
This patch is loosely based on prior patches submitted by KaiGai Kohei,
and unsubmitted code by Simon Riggs.
Reviewed by: KaiGai Kohei, Markus Wanner, Andres Freund,
Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, Amit Kapila
Once we've received a shutdown signal (SIGINT or SIGTERM), we should not
launch any more child processes, even if we get signals requesting such.
The normal code path for spawning backends has always understood that,
but the postmaster's infrastructure for hot standby and autovacuum didn't
get the memo. As reported by Hari Babu in bug #7643, this could lead to
failure to shut down at all in some cases, such as when SIGINT is received
just before the startup process sends PMSIGNAL_RECOVERY_STARTED: we'd
launch a bgwriter and checkpointer, and then those processes would have no
idea that they ought to quit. Similarly, launching a new autovacuum worker
would result in waiting till it finished before shutting down.
Also, switch the order of the code blocks in reaper() that detect startup
process crash versus shutdown termination. Once we've sent it a signal,
we should not consider that exit(1) is surprising. This is just a cosmetic
fix since shutdown occurs correctly anyway, but better not to log a phony
complaint about startup process crash.
Back-patch to 9.0. Some parts of this might be applicable before that,
but given the lack of prior complaints I'm not going to worry too much
about older branches.
We need to avoid calling WaitLatch with timeouts exceeding INT_MAX.
Fortunately a simple clamp will do the trick, since no harm is done if
the wait times out before it's really time to rotate the log file.
Per bug #7670 (probably bug #7545 is the same thing, too).
In passing, fix bogus definition of log_rotation_age's maximum value in
guc.c --- it was numerically right, but only because MINS_PER_HOUR and
SECS_PER_MINUTE have the same value.
Back-patch to 9.2. Before that, syslogger wasn't using WaitLatch.
dlist_delete, dlist_insert_after, dlist_insert_before, slist_insert_after
do not need access to the list header, and indeed insisting on that negates
one of the main advantages of a doubly-linked list.
In consequence, revert addition of "cache_bucket" field to CatCTup.
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
Provide a common implementation of embedded singly-linked and
doubly-linked lists. "Embedded" in the sense that the nodes'
next/previous pointers exist within some larger struct; this design
choice reduces memory allocation overhead.
Most of the implementation uses inlineable functions (where supported),
for performance.
Some existing uses of both types of lists have been converted to the new
code, for demonstration purposes. Other uses can (and probably will) be
converted in the future. Since dllist.c is unused after this conversion,
it has been removed.
Author: Andres Freund
Some tweaks by me
Reviewed by Tom Lane, Peter Geoghegan
In the previous coding, new backend processes would attempt to create their
self-pipe during the OwnLatch call in InitProcess. However, pipe creation
could fail if the kernel is short of resources; and the system does not
recover gracefully from a FATAL error right there, since we have armed the
dead-man switch for this process and not yet set up the on_shmem_exit
callback that would disarm it. The postmaster then forces an unnecessary
database-wide crash and restart, as reported by Sean Chittenden.
There are various ways we could rearrange the code to fix this, but the
simplest and sanest seems to be to split out creation of the self-pipe into
a new function InitializeLatchSupport, which must be called from a place
where failure is allowed. For most processes that gets called in
InitProcess or InitAuxiliaryProcess, but processes that don't call either
but still use latches need their own calls.
Back-patch to 9.1, which has only a part of the latch logic that 9.2 and
HEAD have, but nonetheless includes this bug.
Our getnameinfo() replacement implementation in getaddrinfo.c failed
unless NI_NUMERICHOST and NI_NUMERICSERV were given as flags, because
it doesn't resolve host names, only numeric IPs. But per standard,
when those flags are not given, an implementation can still degrade to
not returning host names, so this restriction is unnecessary. When we
remove it, we can eliminate some code in postmaster.c that apparently
tried to work around that.
Similar changes were done to pg_hba.conf earlier already, this commit makes
pg_ident.conf to behave the same as pg_hba.conf.
This has two user-visible effects. First, if pg_ident.conf contains multiple
errors, the whole file is parsed at postmaster startup time and all the
errors are immediately reported. Before this patch, the file was parsed and
the errors were reported only when someone tries to connect using an
authentication method that uses the file, and the parsing stopped on first
error. Second, if you SIGHUP to reload the config files, and the new
pg_ident.conf file contains an error, the error is logged but the old file
stays in effect.
Also, regular expressions in pg_ident.conf are now compiled only once when
the file is loaded, rather than every time the a user is authenticated. That
should speed up authentication if you have a lot of regexps in the file.
Amit Kapila
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
Replace unix_socket_directory with unix_socket_directories, which is a list
of socket directories, and adjust postmaster's code to allow zero or more
Unix-domain sockets to be created.
This is mostly a straightforward change, but since the Unix sockets ought
to be created after the TCP/IP sockets for safety reasons (better chance
of detecting a port number conflict), AddToDataDirLockFile needs to be
fixed to support out-of-order updates of data directory lockfile lines.
That's a change that had been foreseen to be necessary someday anyway.
Honza Horak, reviewed and revised by Tom Lane
Should be limited to the maximum number of connections excluding
autovacuum workers, not including.
Add similar check for max_wal_senders, which should never be higher than
max_connections.
In the original coding of the log rotation stuff, we did not bother to make
the truncation logic work for the very first rotation after postmaster
start (or after a syslogger crash and restart). It just always appended
in that case. It did not seem terribly important at the time, but we've
recently had two separate complaints from people who expected it to work
unsurprisingly. (Both users tend to restart the postmaster about as often
as a log rotation is configured to happen, which is maybe not typical use,
but still...) Since the initial log file is opened in the postmaster,
fixing this requires passing down some more state to the syslogger child
process.
It's always been like this, so back-patch to all supported branches.
ForwardFsyncRequest() supposed that it could only be called in regular
backends, which used to be true; but since the splitup of bgwriter and
checkpointer, it is also called in the bgwriter. We do not want to count
such calls in pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend statistics, so fix things
so that they aren't.
(It's worth noting here that this implies an alarmingly large increase in
the expected amount of cross-process fsync request traffic, which may well
mean that the process splitup was not such a hot idea.)
mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to
create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process. This led
to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as
intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary
processes such as walwriter and walreceiver. Creation of the table in the
bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone
to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are
never acted on. So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd
which could result in data loss after an OS crash. I think there is no
live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never
perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for
future breakage in those processes too.
To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's
AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for
the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable. Having done
that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as
am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown. (Note that we
could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(),
because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain()
before entering any of the process-type-specific code.)
Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of
bgwriter and checkpointer processes. The bogus pendingOpsTable exists
in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent
any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older
branches alone.
In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
Management of timeouts was getting a little cumbersome; what we
originally had was more than enough back when we were only concerned
about deadlocks and query cancel; however, when we added timeouts for
standby processes, the code got considerably messier. Since there are
plans to add more complex timeouts, this seems a good time to introduce
a central timeout handling module.
External modules register their timeout handlers during process
initialization, and later enable and disable them as they see fit using
a simple API; timeout.c is in charge of keeping track of which timeouts
are in effect at any time, installing a common SIGALRM signal handler,
and calling setitimer() as appropriate to ensure timely firing of
external handlers.
timeout.c additionally supports pluggable modules to add their own
timeouts, though this capability isn't exercised anywhere yet.
Additionally, as of this commit, walsender processes are aware of
timeouts; we had a preexisting bug there that made those ignore SIGALRM,
thus being subject to unhandled deadlocks, particularly during the
authentication phase. This has already been fixed in back branches in
commit 0bf8eb2a, which see for more details.
Main author: Zoltán Böszörményi
Some review and cleanup by Álvaro Herrera
Extensive reworking by Tom Lane
All Unix-oid platforms that we currently support should have waitpid(),
since it's in V2 of the Single Unix Spec. Our git history shows that
the wait3 code was added to support NextStep, which we officially dropped
support for as of 9.2. So get rid of the configure test, and simplify the
macro spaghetti in reaper(). Per suggestion from Fujii Masao.
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.
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.
To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
The comments claimed that wasting the last segment made it easier to do
calculations with XLogRecPtrs, because you don't have problems representing
last-byte-position-plus-1 that way. In my experience, however, it only made
things more complicated, because the there was two ways to represent the
boundary at the beginning of a logical log file: logid = n+1 and xrecoff = 0,
or as xlogid = n and xrecoff = 4GB - XLOG_SEG_SIZE. Some functions were
picky about which representation was used.
Also, use a 64-bit segment number instead of the log/seg combination, to
point to a certain WAL segment. We assume that all platforms have a working
64-bit integer type nowadays.
This is an incompatible change in WAL format, so bumping WAL version number.
Formerly, if the system clock went backwards, the stats collector would
fail to update the stats file any more until the clock reading again
exceeds whatever timestamp was last written into the stats file. Such
glitches in the clock's behavior are not terribly unlikely on machines
not using NTP. Such a scenario has been observed to cause regression test
failures in the buildfarm, and it could have bad effects on the behavior
of autovacuum, so it seems prudent to install some defenses.
We could directly detect the clock going backwards by adding
GetCurrentTimestamp calls in the stats collector's main loop, but that
would hurt performance on platforms where GetCurrentTimestamp is expensive.
To minimize the performance hit in normal cases, adopt a more complicated
scheme wherein backends check for clock skew when reading the stats file,
and if they see it, signal the stats collector by sending an extra stats
inquiry message. The stats collector does an extra GetCurrentTimestamp
only when it receives an inquiry with an apparently out-of-order
timestamp.
To avoid unnecessary GetCurrentTimestamp calls, expand the inquiry messages
to carry the backend's current clock reading as well as its stats cutoff
time. The latter, being intentionally slightly in-the-past, would trigger
more clock rechecks than we need if it were used for this purpose.
We might want to backpatch this change at some point, but let's let it
shake out in the buildfarm for awhile first.
Alvaro Herrera
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Kevin Grittner
Heikki Linnakangas
Magnus Hagander