existing lock manager and spinlocks: it understands exclusive vs shared
lock but has few other fancy features. Replace most uses of spinlocks
with lightweight locks. All remaining uses of spinlocks have very short
lock hold times (a few dozen instructions), so tweak spinlock backoff
code to work efficiently given this assumption. All per my proposal on
pghackers 26-Sep-01.
buffer manager with 'pg_clog', a specialized access method modeled
on pg_xlog. This simplifies startup (don't need to play games to
open pg_log; among other things, OverrideTransactionSystem goes away),
should improve performance a little, and opens the door to recycling
commit log space by removing no-longer-needed segments of the commit
log. Actual recycling is not there yet, but I felt I should commit
this part separately since it'd still be useful if we chose not to
do transaction ID wraparound.
O_SYNC, or O_DSYNC (as available on a given platform). Add GUC parameter
to control sync method.
Also, add defense to XLogWrite to prevent it from going nuts if passed
a target write position that's past the end of the buffers so far filled
by XLogInsert.
* Store two past checkpoint locations, not just one, in pg_control.
On startup, we fall back to the older checkpoint if the newer one
is unreadable. Also, a physical copy of the newest checkpoint record
is kept in pg_control for possible use in disaster recovery (ie,
complete loss of pg_xlog). Also add a version number for pg_control
itself. Remove archdir from pg_control; it ought to be a GUC
parameter, not a special case (not that it's implemented yet anyway).
* Suppress successive checkpoint records when nothing has been entered
in the WAL log since the last one. This is not so much to avoid I/O
as to make it actually useful to keep track of the last two
checkpoints. If the things are right next to each other then there's
not a lot of redundancy gained...
* Change CRC scheme to a true 64-bit CRC, not a pair of 32-bit CRCs
on alternate bytes. Polynomial borrowed from ECMA DLT1 standard.
* Fix XLOG record length handling so that it will work at BLCKSZ = 32k.
* Change XID allocation to work more like OID allocation. (This is of
dubious necessity, but I think it's a good idea anyway.)
* Fix a number of minor bugs, such as off-by-one logic for XLOG file
wraparound at the 4 gig mark.
* Add documentation and clean up some coding infelicities; move file
format declarations out to include files where planned contrib
utilities can get at them.
* Checkpoint will now occur every CHECKPOINT_SEGMENTS log segments or
every CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT seconds, whichever comes first. It is also
possible to force a checkpoint by sending SIGUSR1 to the postmaster
(undocumented feature...)
* Defend against kill -9 postmaster by storing shmem block's key and ID
in postmaster.pid lockfile, and checking at startup to ensure that no
processes are still connected to old shmem block (if it still exists).
* Switch backends to accept SIGQUIT rather than SIGUSR1 for emergency
stop, for symmetry with postmaster and xlog utilities. Clean up signal
handling in bootstrap.c so that xlog utilities launched by postmaster
will react to signals better.
* Standalone bootstrap now grabs lockfile in target directory, as added
insurance against running it in parallel with live postmaster.
only if at least N other backends currently have open transactions. This
is not a great deal of intelligence about whether a delay might be
profitable ... but it beats no intelligence at all. Note that the default
COMMIT_DELAY is still zero --- this new code does nothing unless that
setting is changed.
Also, mark ENABLEFSYNC as a system-wide setting. It's no longer safe to
allow that to be set per-backend, since we may be relying on some other
backend's fsync to have synced the WAL log.
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Thomas G. Lockhart