durable_rename_excl() attempts to avoid overwriting any existing files
by using link() and unlink(), and it falls back to rename() on some
platforms (aka WIN32), which offers no such overwrite protection. Most
callers use durable_rename_excl() just in case there is an existing
file, but in practice there shouldn't be one (see below for more
details).
Furthermore, failures during durable_rename_excl() can result in
multiple hard links to the same file. As per Nathan's tests, it is
possible to end up with two links to the same file in pg_wal after a
crash just before unlink() during WAL recycling. Specifically, the test
produced links to the same file for the current WAL file and the next
one because the half-recycled WAL file was re-recycled upon restarting,
leading to WAL corruption.
This change replaces all the calls of durable_rename_excl() to
durable_rename(). This removes the protection against accidentally
overwriting an existing file, but some platforms are already living
without it and ordinarily there shouldn't be one. The function itself
is left around in case any extensions are using it. It will be removed
on HEAD via a follow-up commit.
Here is a summary of the existing callers of durable_rename_excl() (see
second discussion link at the bottom), replaced by this commit. First,
basic_archive used it to avoid overwriting an archive concurrently
created by another server, but as mentioned above, it will still
overwrite files on some platforms. Second, xlog.c uses it to recycle
past WAL segments, where an overwrite should not happen (origin of the
change at f0e37a8) because there are protections about the WAL segment
to select when recycling an entry. The third and last area is related
to the write of timeline history files. writeTimeLineHistory() will
write a new timeline history file at the end of recovery on promotion,
so there should be no such files for the same timeline.
What remains is writeTimeLineHistoryFile(), that can be used in parallel
by a WAL receiver and the startup process, and some digging of the
buildfarm shows that EEXIST from a WAL receiver can happen with an error
of "could not link file \"pg_wal/xlogtemp.NN\" to \"pg_wal/MM.history\",
which would cause an automatic restart of the WAL receiver as it is
promoted to FATAL, hence this should improve the stability of the WAL
receiver as rename() would overwrite an existing TLI history file
already fetched by the startup process at recovery.
This is a bug fix, but knowing the unlikeliness of the problem involving
one or more crashes at an exceptionally bad moment, no backpatch is
done. Also, I want to be careful with such changes (aaa3aed did the
opposite of this change by removing HAVE_WORKING_LINK so as Windows
would do a link() rather than a rename() but this was not
concurrent-safe). A backpatch could be revisited in the future. This
is the second time this change is attempted, ccfbd92 being the first
one, but this time no assertions are added for the case of a TLI history
file written concurrently by the WAL receiver or the startup process
because we can expect one to exist (some of the TAP tests are able to
trigger with a proper timing).
Author: Nathan Bossart
Reviewed-by: Robert Haas, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220407182954.GA1231544@nathanxps13
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/Ym6GZbqQdlalSKSG@paquier.xyz
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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