There's a race condition if a file changes in the source system
after we have collected the file list. If the file becomes larger,
we only fetched up to its original size. That can easily result in
a truncated file. That's not a problem for relation files, files
in pg_xact, etc. because any actions on them will be replayed from
the WAL. However, configuration files are affected.
This commit mitigates the race condition by fetching small files in
whole, even if they have grown. A test is added in which an extra
file copied is concurrently grown with the output of pg_rewind thus
guaranteeing it to have changed in size during the operation. This
is not a full fix: we still believe the original file size for files
larger than 1 MB. That should be enough for configuration files,
and doing more than that would require big changes to the chunking
logic in libpq_source.c.
This mitigates the race condition if the file is modified between
the original scan of files and copying the file, but there's still
a race condition if a file is changed while it's being copied.
That's a much smaller window, though, and pg_basebackup has the
same issue.
This race can be seen with pg_auto_failover, which frequently uses
ALTER SYSTEM, which updates postgresql.auto.conf. Often, pg_rewind
will fail, because the postgresql.auto.conf file changed concurrently
and a partial version of it was copied to the target. The partial
file would fail to parse, preventing the server from starting up.
Author: Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-by: Cary Huang
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/f67feb24-5833-88cb-1020-19a4a2b83ac7%40iki.fi
This makes the abstraction of a "source" server more clear, by introducing
a common abstract class, borrowing the object-oriented programming term,
that represents all the operations that can be done on the source server.
There are two implementations of it, one for fetching via libpq, and
another to fetch from a local directory. This adds some code, but makes it
easier to understand what's going on.
The copy_executeFileMap() and libpq_executeFileMap() functions contained
basically the same logic, just calling different functions to fetch the
source files. Refactor so that the common logic is in one place, in a new
function called perform_rewind().
Reviewed-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Soumyadeep Chakraborty
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0c5b3783-af52-3ee5-f8fa-6e794061f70d%40iki.fi
Michael Paquier
Bruce Momjian
Daniel Gustafsson
Heikki Linnakangas