The cascading standby patch in 9.2 changed the way WAL files are treated
when restored from the archive. Before, they were restored under a temporary
filename, and not kept in pg_xlog, but after the patch, they were copied
under pg_xlog. This is necessary for a cascading standby to find them, but
it also means that if the archive goes offline and a standby is restarted,
it can recover back to where it was using the files in pg_xlog. It also
means that if you take an offline backup from a standby server, it includes
all the required WAL files in pg_xlog.
However, the same change was not made to timeline history files, so if the
WAL segment containing the checkpoint record contains a timeline switch, you
will still get an error if you try to restart recovery without the archive,
or recover from an offline backup taken from the standby.
With this patch, timeline history files restored from archive are copied
into pg_xlog like WAL files are, so that pg_xlog contains all the files
required to recover. This is a corner-case pre-existing issue in 9.2, but
even more important in master where it's possible for a standby to follow a
timeline switch through streaming replication. To make that possible, the
timeline history files must be present in pg_xlog.
This gets rid of XLByteLT, XLByteLE, XLByteEQ and XLByteAdvance.
These were useful for brevity when XLogRecPtrs were split in
xlogid/xrecoff; but now that they are simple uint64's, they are just
clutter. The only downside to making this change would be ease of
backporting patches, but that has been negated by other substantive
changes to the involved code anyway. The clarity of simpler expressions
makes the change worthwhile.
Most of the changes are mechanical, but in a couple of places, the patch
author chose to invert the operator sense, making the code flow more
logical (and more in line with preceding comments).
Author: Andres Freund
Eyeballed by Dimitri Fontaine and Alvaro Herrera
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.
This allows us to do some more rigorous sanity checking for various
incorrect point-in-time recovery scenarios, and provides more information
for debugging purposes. It will also come handy in the upcoming patch to
allow timeline switches to be replicated by streaming replication.
Files opened with BasicOpenFile or PathNameOpenFile are not automatically
cleaned up on error. That puts unnecessary burden on callers that only want
to keep the file open for a short time. There is AllocateFile, but that
returns a buffered FILE * stream, which in many cases is not the nicest API
to work with. So add function called OpenTransientFile, which returns a
unbuffered fd that's cleaned up like the FILE* returned by AllocateFile().
This plugs a few rare fd leaks in error cases:
1. copy_file() - fixed by by using OpenTransientFile instead of BasicOpenFile
2. XLogFileInit() - fixed by adding close() calls to the error cases. Can't
use OpenTransientFile here because the fd is supposed to persist over
transaction boundaries.
3. lo_import/lo_export - fixed by using OpenTransientFile instead of
PathNameOpenFile.
In addition to plugging those leaks, this replaces many BasicOpenFile() calls
with OpenTransientFile() that were not leaking, because the code meticulously
closed the file on error. That wasn't strictly necessary, but IMHO it's good
for robustness.
The same leaks exist in older versions, but given the rarity of the issues,
I'm not backpatching this. Not yet, anyway - it might be good to backpatch
later, after this mechanism has had some more testing in master branch.
When I moved ExecuteRecoveryCommand() from xlog.c to xlogarchive.c, I didn't
realize that it's called from the checkpoint process, not the startup
process. I tried to use InRedo variable to decide whether or not to attempt
cleaning up the archive (must not do so before we have read the initial
checkpoint record), but that variable is only valid within the startup
process.
Instead, let ExecuteRecoveryCommand() always clean up the archive, and add
an explicit argument to RestoreArchivedFile() to say whether that's allowed
or not. The caller knows better.
Reported by Erik Rijkers, diagnosis by Fujii Masao. Only 9.3devel is
affected.
This is just refactoring, to make the functions accessible outside xlog.c.
A followup patch will make use of that, to allow fetching timeline history
files over streaming replication.
