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Tom Lane 8269804245 Avoid using potentially-under-aligned page buffers.
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
2018-09-01 15:27:13 -04:00
config Fix typos 2018-07-10 11:16:04 +02:00
contrib Avoid using potentially-under-aligned page buffers. 2018-09-01 15:27:13 -04:00
doc doc: correct syntax of pgtrgm examples in older releases 2018-08-25 15:03:32 -04:00
src Avoid using potentially-under-aligned page buffers. 2018-09-01 15:27:13 -04:00
.dir-locals.el emacs: Set indent-tabs-mode in perl-mode 2015-04-12 23:53:23 -04:00
.gitattributes Fix whitespace and remove obsolete gitattributes entry 2016-03-13 16:03:13 -04:00
.gitignore Add .gitignore entries for AIX-specific intermediate build artifacts. 2015-07-08 20:44:22 -04:00
aclocal.m4 Replace our hacked version of ax_pthread.m4 with latest upstream version. 2015-07-08 20:36:06 +03:00
configure Stamp 9.6.10. 2018-08-06 16:07:43 -04:00
configure.in Stamp 9.6.10. 2018-08-06 16:07:43 -04:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2018 2018-01-02 23:30:12 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Fix distclean/maintainer-clean targets to remove top-level tmp_install dir. 2015-05-13 18:48:05 -04:00
HISTORY Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -04:00
Makefile Fix non-GNU makefiles for AIX make. 2017-11-30 00:57:31 -08:00
README Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -04:00
README.git Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -04:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	https://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
https://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.