There's a project policy against using plain "char buf[BLCKSZ]" local
or static variables as page buffers; preferred style is to palloc or
malloc each buffer to ensure it is MAXALIGN'd. However, that policy's
been ignored in an increasing number of places. We've apparently got
away with it so far, probably because (a) relatively few people use
platforms on which misalignment causes core dumps and/or (b) the
variables chance to be sufficiently aligned anyway. But this is not
something to rely on. Moreover, even if we don't get a core dump,
we might be paying a lot of cycles for misaligned accesses.
To fix, invent new union types PGAlignedBlock and PGAlignedXLogBlock
that the compiler must allocate with sufficient alignment, and use
those in place of plain char arrays.
I used these types even for variables where there's no risk of a
misaligned access, since ensuring proper alignment should make
kernel data transfers faster. I also changed some places where
we had been palloc'ing short-lived buffers, for coding style
uniformity and to save palloc/pfree overhead.
Since this seems to be a live portability hazard (despite the lack
of field reports), back-patch to all supported versions.
Patch by me; thanks to Michael Paquier for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1535618100.1286.3.camel@credativ.de
Currently the extension's pg_prewarm() function didn't check
interrupts once it started "warming" data. Since individual calls can
take a long while it's important for them to be interruptible.
Backpatch to 9.4 where pg_prewarm was introduced.
Prominent binaries already had this metadata. A handful of minor
binaries, such as pg_regress.exe, still lack it; efforts to eliminate
such exceptions are welcome.
Michael Paquier, reviewed by MauMau.
Because of gcc -Wmissing-prototypes, all functions in dynamically
loadable modules must have a separate prototype declaration. This is
meant to detect global functions that are not declared in header files,
but in cases where the function is called via dfmgr, this is redundant.
Besides filling up space with boilerplate, this is a frequent source of
compiler warnings in extension modules.
We can fix that by creating the function prototype as part of the
PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1 macro, which such modules have to use anyway. That
makes the code of modules cleaner, because there is one less place where
the entry points have to be listed, and creates an additional check that
functions have the right prototype.
Remove now redundant prototypes from contrib and other modules.
