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Tom Lane 969d7cd431 Install a "dead man switch" to allow the postmaster to detect cases where
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory.  We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead.  Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft).  If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.

The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway.  This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.

This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.

Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
2009-05-05 19:59:00 +00:00
config Update config.guess and config.sub 2009-04-09 21:33:02 +00:00
contrib Blank line Makefile cleanups. 2009-04-28 17:07:50 +00:00
doc Disable the use of Unicode escapes in string constants (U&'') when 2009-05-05 18:32:17 +00:00
src Install a "dead man switch" to allow the postmaster to detect cases where 2009-05-05 19:59:00 +00:00
aclocal.m4 Add new auto-detection of thread flags. 2004-04-23 18:15:55 +00:00
configure commit and tag beta1 2009-04-10 00:20:10 +00:00
configure.in commit and tag beta1 2009-04-10 00:20:10 +00:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2009. 2009-01-01 17:24:05 +00:00
GNUmakefile.in Modify distdir rule to skip .git directory. 2009-01-15 01:53:49 +00:00
Makefile Remove remains of old depend target. 2007-01-20 17:16:17 +00:00
README Point to our download URL, rather than listing interface in the README 2008-05-06 22:02:12 +00:00
README.CVS Some further editorializing on README.CVS. 2004-03-28 06:09:08 +00:00

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/.