This is a second try at what commit 57431a911 tried to do, namely,
launch the syslogger before we open postmaster sockets so that our
messages about the sockets end up in the syslogger files. That
commit fell foul of a bunch of subtle issues caused by trying to
launch a postmaster child process before creating shared memory.
Rather than messing with that interaction, let's postpone opening
the sockets till after we launch the syslogger.
This would not have been terribly safe before commit 7de19fbc0,
because we relied on socket opening to detect whether any competing
postmasters were using the same port number. But now that we choose
IPC keys without regard to the port number, there's no interaction
to worry about.
Also delay creation of the external PID file (if requested) till after
the sockets are open, since external code could plausibly be relying
on that ordering of events. And postpone most of the work of
RemovePgTempFiles() so that that potentially-slow processing still
happens after we make the external PID file. We have to be a bit
careful about that last though: as noted in the discussion subsequent to
bug #15804, EXEC_BACKEND builds still have to clear the parameter-file
temp dir before launching the syslogger.
Patch by me; thanks to Michael Paquier for review/testing.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15804-3721117bf40fb654@postgresql.org
Traditionally, "pg_ctl start -w" has waited for the server to become
ready to accept connections by attempting a connection once per second.
That has the major problem that connection issues (for instance, a
kernel packet filter blocking traffic) can't be reliably told apart
from server startup issues, and the minor problem that if server startup
isn't quick, we accumulate "the database system is starting up" spam
in the server log. We've hacked around many of the possible connection
issues, but it resulted in ugly and complicated code in pg_ctl.c.
In commit c61559ec3, I changed the probe rate to every tenth of a second.
That prompted Jeff Janes to complain that the log-spam problem had become
much worse. In the ensuing discussion, Andres Freund pointed out that
we could dispense with connection attempts altogether if the postmaster
were changed to report its status in postmaster.pid, which "pg_ctl start"
already relies on being able to read. This patch implements that, teaching
postmaster.c to report a status string into the pidfile at the same
state-change points already identified as being of interest for systemd
status reporting (cf commit 7d17e683f). pg_ctl no longer needs to link
with libpq at all; all its functions now depend on reading server files.
In support of this, teach AddToDataDirLockFile() to allow addition of
postmaster.pid lines in not-necessarily-sequential order. This is needed
on Windows where the SHMEM_KEY line will never be written at all. We still
have the restriction that we don't want to truncate the pidfile; document
the reasons for that a bit better.
Also, fix the pg_ctl TAP tests so they'll notice if "start -w" mode
is broken --- before, they'd just wait out the sixty seconds until
the loop gives up, and then report success anyway. (Yes, I found that
out the hard way.)
While at it, arrange for pg_ctl to not need to #include miscadmin.h;
as a rather low-level backend header, requiring that to be compilable
client-side is pretty dubious. This requires moving the #define's
associated with the pidfile into a new header file, and moving
PG_BACKEND_VERSIONSTR someplace else. For lack of a clearly better
"someplace else", I put it into port.h, beside the declaration of
find_other_exec(), since most users of that macro are passing the value to
find_other_exec(). (initdb still depends on miscadmin.h, but at least
pg_ctl and pg_upgrade no longer do.)
In passing, fix main.c so that PG_BACKEND_VERSIONSTR actually defines the
output of "postgres -V", which remarkably it had never done before.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAMkU=1xJW8e+CTotojOMBd-yzUvD0e_JZu2xHo=MnuZ4__m7Pg@mail.gmail.com
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane