Up to now large swathes of backend code ran inside signal handlers
while reading commands from the client, to allow for speedy reaction to
asynchronous events. Most prominently shared invalidation and NOTIFY
handling. That means that complex code like the starting/stopping of
transactions is run in signal handlers... The required code was
fragile and verbose, and is likely to contain bugs.
That approach also severely limited what could be done while
communicating with the client. As the read might be from within
openssl it wasn't safely possible to trigger an error, e.g. to cancel
a backend in idle-in-transaction state. We did that in some cases,
namely fatal errors, nonetheless.
Now that FE/BE communication in the backend employs non-blocking
sockets and latches to block, we can quite simply interrupt reads from
signal handlers by setting the latch. That allows us to signal an
interrupted read, which is supposed to be retried after returning from
within the ssl library.
As signal handlers now only need to set the latch to guarantee timely
interrupt processing, remove a fair amount of complicated & fragile
code from async.c and sinval.c.
We could now actually start to process some kinds of interrupts, like
sinval ones, more often that before, but that seems better done
separately.
This work will hopefully allow to handle cases like being blocked by
sending data, interrupting idle transactions and similar to be
implemented without too much effort. In addition to allowing getting
rid of ImmediateInterruptOK, that is.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
This allows to introduce more elaborate handling of interrupts while
reading from a socket. Currently some interrupt handlers have to do
significant work from inside signal handlers, and it's very hard to
correctly write code to do so. Generic signal handler limitations,
combined with the fact that we can't safely jump out of a signal
handler while reading from the client have prohibited implementation
of features like timeouts for idle-in-transaction.
Additionally we use the latch code to wait in a couple places where we
previously only had waiting code on windows as other platforms just
busy looped.
This can increase the number of systemcalls happening during FE/BE
communication. Benchmarks so far indicate that the impact isn't very
high, and there's room for optimization in the latch code. The chance
of cleaning up the usage of latches gives us, seem to outweigh the
risk of small performance regressions.
This commit theoretically can't used without the next patch in the
series, as WaitLatchOrSocket is not defined to be fully signal
safe. As we already do that in some cases though, it seems better to
keep the commits separate, so they're easier to understand.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Move the functions within the file so that public interface functions come
first, followed by internal functions. Previously, be_tls_write was first,
then internal stuff, and finally the rest of the public interface, which
clearly didn't make much sense.
Per Andres Freund's complaint.
This refactoring is in preparation for adding support for other SSL
implementations, with no user-visible effects. There are now two #defines,
USE_OPENSSL which is defined when building with OpenSSL, and USE_SSL which
is defined when building with any SSL implementation. Currently, OpenSSL is
the only implementation so the two #defines go together, but USE_SSL is
supposed to be used for implementation-independent code.
The libpq SSL code is changed to use a custom BIO, which does all the raw
I/O, like we've been doing in the backend for a long time. That makes it
possible to use MSG_NOSIGNAL to block SIGPIPE when using SSL, which avoids
a couple of syscall for each send(). Probably doesn't make much performance
difference in practice - the SSL encryption is expensive enough to mask the
effect - but it was a natural result of this refactoring.
Based on a patch by Martijn van Oosterhout from 2006. Briefly reviewed by
Alvaro Herrera, Andreas Karlsson, Jeff Janes.
Andres Freund
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas