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Heikki Linnakangas 89fd72cbf2 Introduce a pipe between postmaster and each backend, which can be used to
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open,
so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently
be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling
loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all
the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that.

This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a
bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout,
postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable.

The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method
previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died,
but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe
returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return
true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie).
Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise
WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while
PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to
busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state.

Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and
Florian Pflug.
2011-07-08 18:44:07 +03:00
config Adjust configure to use "+Olibmerrno" with HP-UX C compiler, if possible. 2011-05-26 17:29:33 -04:00
contrib Fix use of unportable %m format 2011-07-07 22:48:59 +03:00
doc Add item about Clang support to 9.1 release notes 2011-07-08 17:04:49 +03:00
src Introduce a pipe between postmaster and each backend, which can be used to 2011-07-08 18:44:07 +03:00
.gitignore Add gitignore for mingw/cygwin build outputs 2011-06-09 18:11:47 +02:00
aclocal.m4 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
configure Start using flexible array members 2011-06-16 22:45:38 +03:00
configure.in Start using flexible array members 2011-06-16 22:45:38 +03:00
COPYRIGHT Stamp copyrights for year 2011. 2011-01-01 13:18:15 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Support "make check" in contrib 2011-04-25 22:27:11 +03:00
Makefile Allow make check in PL directories 2011-02-15 06:52:12 +02:00
README Remove useless whitespace at end of lines 2010-11-23 22:34:55 +02:00
README.git Trivial typo fix. 2010-09-21 14:16:00 -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:

	http://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.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  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
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.