When there are cost-delay-related storage options set for a table,
trying to make that table participate in the autovacuum cost-limit
balancing algorithm produces undesirable results: instead of using the
configured values, the global values are always used,
as illustrated by Mark Kirkwood in
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/52FACF15.8020507@catalyst.net.nz
Since the mechanism is already complicated, just disable it for those
cases rather than trying to make it cope. There are undesirable
side-effects from this too, namely that the total I/O impact on the
system will be higher whenever such tables are vacuumed. However, this
is seen as less harmful than slowing down vacuum, because that would
cause bloat to accumulate. Anyway, in the new system it is possible to
tweak options to get the precise behavior one wants, whereas with the
previous system one was simply hosed.
This has been broken forever, so backpatch to all supported branches.
This might affect systems where cost_limit and cost_delay have been set
for individual tables.
When autovacuum is nominally off, we will still launch autovac workers
to vacuum tables that are at risk of XID wraparound. But after we'd done
that, an autovac worker would proceed to autovacuum every table in the
targeted database, if they meet the usual thresholds for autovacuuming.
This is at best pretty unexpected; at worst it delays response to the
wraparound threat. Fix it so that if autovacuum is nominally off, we
*only* do forced vacuums and not any other work.
Per gripe from Andrey Zhidenkov. This has been like this all along,
so back-patch to all supported branches.
In yesterday's commit 2dc4f011fd, I tried
to force buffering of stdout/stderr in initdb to be what it is by
default when the program is run interactively on Unix (since that's how
most manual testing is done). This tripped over the fact that Windows
doesn't support _IOLBF mode. We dealt with that a long time ago in
syslogger.c by falling back to unbuffered mode on Windows. Export that
solution in port.h and use it in initdb.
Back-patch to 8.4, like the previous commit.
This was not changed in HEAD, but will be done later as part of a
pgindent run. Future pgindent runs will also do this.
Report by Tom Lane
Backpatch through all supported branches, but not HEAD
According to the Single Unix Spec and assorted man pages, you're supposed
to use the constants named AF_xxx when setting ai_family for a getaddrinfo
call. In a few places we were using PF_xxx instead. Use of PF_xxx
appears to be an ancient BSD convention that was not adopted by later
standardization. On BSD and most later Unixen, it doesn't matter much
because those constants have equivalent values anyway; but nonetheless
this code is not per spec.
In the same vein, replace PF_INET by AF_INET in one socket() call, which
wasn't even consistent with the other socket() call in the same function
let alone the remainder of our code.
Per investigation of a Cygwin trouble report from Marco Atzeri. It's
probably a long shot that this will fix his issue, but it's wrong in
any case.
Previously, in some places, socket creation errors were checked for
negative values, which is not true for Windows because sockets are
unsigned. This masked socket creation errors on Windows.
Backpatch through 9.0. 8.4 doesn't have the infrastructure to fix this.
Formerly, we set up the postmaster's signal handling only when we were
about to start launching subprocesses. This is a bad idea though, as
it means that for example a SIGINT arriving before that will kill the
postmaster instantly, perhaps leaving lockfiles, socket files, shared
memory, etc laying about. We'd rather that such a signal caused orderly
postmaster termination including releasing of those resources. A simple
fix is to move the PostmasterMain stanza that initializes signal handling
to an earlier point, before we've created any such resources. Then, an
early-arriving signal will be blocked until we're ready to deal with it
in the usual way. (The only part that really needs to be moved up is
blocking of signals, but it seems best to keep the signal handler
installation calls together with that; for one thing this ensures the
kernel won't drop any signals we wished to get. The handlers won't get
invoked in any case until we unblock signals in ServerLoop.)
Per a report from MauMau. He proposed changing the way "pg_ctl stop"
works to deal with this, but that'd just be masking one symptom not
fixing the core issue.
It's been like this since forever, so back-patch to all supported branches.
The code for matching clients to pg_hba.conf lines that specify host names
(instead of IP address ranges) failed to complain if reverse DNS lookup
failed; instead it silently didn't match, so that you might end up getting
a surprising "no pg_hba.conf entry for ..." error, as seen in bug #9518
from Mike Blackwell. Since we don't want to make this a fatal error in
situations where pg_hba.conf contains a mixture of host names and IP
addresses (clients matching one of the numeric entries should not have to
have rDNS data), remember the lookup failure and mention it as DETAIL if
we get to "no pg_hba.conf entry". Apply the same approach to forward-DNS
lookup failures, too, rather than treating them as immediate hard errors.
Along the way, fix a couple of bugs that prevented us from detecting an
rDNS lookup error reliably, and make sure that we make only one rDNS lookup
attempt; formerly, if the lookup attempt failed, the code would try again
for each host name entry in pg_hba.conf. Since more or less the whole
point of this design is to ensure there's only one lookup attempt not one
per entry, the latter point represents a performance bug that seems
sufficient justification for back-patching.
Also, adjust src/port/getaddrinfo.c so that it plays as well as it can
with this code. Which is not all that well, since it does not have actual
support for rDNS lookup, but at least it should return the expected (and
required by spec) error codes so that the main code correctly perceives the
lack of functionality as a lookup failure. It's unlikely that PG is still
being used in production on any machines that require our getaddrinfo.c,
so I'm not excited about working harder than this.
To keep the code in the various branches similar, this includes
back-patching commits c424d0d105 and
1997f34db4 into 9.2 and earlier.
Back-patch to 9.1 where the facility for hostnames in pg_hba.conf was
introduced.
Initialization of this field was not being done according to the
st_changecount protocol (it has to be done within the changecount increment
range, not outside). And the test to see if the value should be reported
as null was wrong. Noted while perusing uses of Port.remote_hostname.
This was wrong from the introduction of this code (commit 4a25bc145),
so back-patch to 9.1.
Per reports from Andres Freund and Luke Campbell, a server failure during
set_pglocale_pgservice results in a segfault rather than a useful error
message, because the infrastructure needed to use ereport hasn't been
initialized; specifically, MemoryContextInit hasn't been called.
One known cause of this is starting the server in a directory it
doesn't have permission to read.
We could try to prevent set_pglocale_pgservice from using anything that
depends on palloc or elog, but that would be messy, and the odds of future
breakage seem high. Moreover there are other things being called in main.c
that look likely to use palloc or elog too --- perhaps those things
shouldn't be there, but they are there today. The best solution seems to
be to move the call of MemoryContextInit to very early in the backend's
real main() function. I've verified that an elog or ereport occurring
immediately after that is now capable of sending something useful to
stderr.
I also added code to elog.c to print something intelligible rather than
just crashing if MemoryContextInit hasn't created the ErrorContext.
This could happen if MemoryContextInit itself fails (due to malloc
failure), and provides some future-proofing against someone trying to
sneak in new code even earlier in server startup.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Since we've only heard reports of
this type of failure recently, it may be that some recent change has made
it more likely to see a crash of this kind; but it sure looks like it's
broken all the way back.
An oversight in commit e710b65c1c allowed
database names beginning with "-" to be treated as though they were secure
command-line switches; and this switch processing occurs before client
authentication, so that even an unprivileged remote attacker could exploit
the bug, needing only connectivity to the postmaster's port. Assorted
exploits for this are possible, some requiring a valid database login,
some not. The worst known problem is that the "-r" switch can be invoked
to redirect the process's stderr output, so that subsequent error messages
will be appended to any file the server can write. This can for example be
used to corrupt the server's configuration files, so that it will fail when
next restarted. Complete destruction of database tables is also possible.
Fix by keeping the database name extracted from a startup packet fully
separate from command-line switches, as had already been done with the
user name field.
The Postgres project thanks Mitsumasa Kondo for discovering this bug,
Kyotaro Horiguchi for drafting the fix, and Noah Misch for recognizing
the full extent of the danger.
Security: CVE-2013-1899
Previously, if the postmaster initialized OpenSSL's PRNG (which it will do
when ssl=on in postgresql.conf), the same pseudo-random state would be
inherited by each forked child process. The problem is masked to a
considerable extent if the incoming connection uses SSL encryption, but
when it does not, identical pseudo-random state is made available to
functions like contrib/pgcrypto. The process's PID does get mixed into any
requested random output, but on most systems that still only results in 32K
or so distinct random sequences available across all Postgres sessions.
This might allow an attacker who has database access to guess the results
of "secure" operations happening in another session.
To fix, forcibly reset the PRNG after fork(). Each child process that has
need for random numbers from OpenSSL's generator will thereby be forced to
go through OpenSSL's normal initialization sequence, which should provide
much greater variability of the sequences. There are other ways we might
do this that would be slightly cheaper, but this approach seems the most
future-proof against SSL-related code changes.
This has been assigned CVE-2013-1900, but since the issue and the patch
have already been publicized on pgsql-hackers, there's no point in trying
to hide this commit.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Marko Kreen
Normally, we suppress sending a tabstats message to the collector unless
there were some actual table stats to send. However, during backend exit
we should force out the message if there are any transaction commit/abort
counts to send, else the session's last few commit/abort counts will never
get reported at all. We had logic for this, but the short-circuit test
at the top of pgstat_report_stat() ignored the "force" flag, with the
consequence that session-ending transactions that touched no database-local
tables would not get counted. Seems to be an oversight in my commit
641912b4d1, which added the "force" flag.
That was back in 8.3, so back-patch to all supported versions.
Once we've received a shutdown signal (SIGINT or SIGTERM), we should not
launch any more child processes, even if we get signals requesting such.
The normal code path for spawning backends has always understood that,
but the postmaster's infrastructure for hot standby and autovacuum didn't
get the memo. As reported by Hari Babu in bug #7643, this could lead to
failure to shut down at all in some cases, such as when SIGINT is received
just before the startup process sends PMSIGNAL_RECOVERY_STARTED: we'd
launch a bgwriter and checkpointer, and then those processes would have no
idea that they ought to quit. Similarly, launching a new autovacuum worker
would result in waiting till it finished before shutting down.
Also, switch the order of the code blocks in reaper() that detect startup
process crash versus shutdown termination. Once we've sent it a signal,
we should not consider that exit(1) is surprising. This is just a cosmetic
fix since shutdown occurs correctly anyway, but better not to log a phony
complaint about startup process crash.
Back-patch to 9.0. Some parts of this might be applicable before that,
but given the lack of prior complaints I'm not going to worry too much
about older branches.
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
Should be limited to the maximum number of connections excluding
autovacuum workers, not including.
Add similar check for max_wal_senders, which should never be higher than
max_connections.
In the original coding of the log rotation stuff, we did not bother to make
the truncation logic work for the very first rotation after postmaster
start (or after a syslogger crash and restart). It just always appended
in that case. It did not seem terribly important at the time, but we've
recently had two separate complaints from people who expected it to work
unsurprisingly. (Both users tend to restart the postmaster about as often
as a log rotation is configured to happen, which is maybe not typical use,
but still...) Since the initial log file is opened in the postmaster,
fixing this requires passing down some more state to the syslogger child
process.
It's always been like this, so back-patch to all supported branches.
In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
There is no reason to do this as early as possible in postmaster startup,
and good reason not to do it until we have completely created the
postmaster's lock file, namely that it might contribute to pg_ctl thinking
that postmaster startup has timed out. (This would require a rather
unusual amount of time to be spent scanning temp file directories, but we
have at least one field report of it happening reproducibly.)
Back-patch to 9.1. Before that, pg_ctl didn't wait for additional info to
be added to the lock file, so it wasn't a problem.
Note that this is not a complete fix to the slow-start issue in 9.1,
because we still had identify_system_timezone being run during postmaster
start in 9.1. But that's at least a reasonably well-defined delay, with
an easy workaround if needed, whereas the temp-files scan is not so
predictable and cannot be avoided.
If it fails to open a new log file, the syslogger assumes there's something
wrong with its parameters (such as log_directory), and stops attempting
automatic time-based or size-based log file rotations. Sending it SIGHUP
is supposed to start that up again. However, the original coding for that
was really bogus, involving clobbering a couple of GUC variables and hoping
that SIGHUP processing would restore them. Get rid of that technique in
favor of maintaining a separate flag showing we've turned rotation off.
Per report from Mark Kirkwood.
Also, the syslogger will automatically attempt to create the log_directory
directory if it doesn't exist, but that was only happening at startup.
For consistency and ease of use, it should do the same whenever the value
of log_directory is changed by SIGHUP.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
We used to only initialize the stack base pointer when starting up a regular
backend, not in other processes. In particular, autovacuum workers can run
arbitrary user code, and without stack-depth checking, infinite recursion
in e.g an index expression will bring down the whole cluster.
The comment about PL/Java using set_stack_base() is not yet true. As the
code stands, PL/java still modifies the stack_base_ptr variable directly.
However, it's been discussed in the PL/Java mailing list that it should be
changed to use the function, because PL/Java is currently oblivious to the
register stack used on Itanium. There's another issues with PL/Java, namely
that the stack base pointer it sets is not really the base of the stack, it
could be something close to the bottom of the stack. That's a separate issue
that might need some further changes to this code, but that's a different
story.
Backpatch to all supported releases.
The original coding of the syslogger had an arbitrary limit of 20 large
messages concurrently in progress, after which it would just punt and dump
message fragments to the output file separately. Our ambitions are a bit
higher than that now, so allow the data structure to expand as necessary.
Reported and patched by Andrew Dunstan; some editing by Tom
The postmaster was coded to treat any unexpected exit of the startup
process (i.e., the WAL replay process) as a catastrophic crash, and not try
to restart it. This was OK so long as the startup process could not have
any sibling postmaster children. However, if a hot-standby backend
crashes, we SIGQUIT the startup process along with everything else, and the
resulting exit is hardly "unexpected". Treating it as such meant we failed
to restart a standby server after any child crash at all, not only a crash
of the WAL replay process as intended. Adjust that. Back-patch to 9.0
where hot standby was introduced.
Force the transaction isolation level to READ COMMITTED in autovacuum
worker and launcher processes. There is no benefit to using a higher
isolation level, and doing so could result in delaying foreground
transactions (or maybe even causing unnecessary serialization failures?).
Noted by Dan Ports.
Also, make sure we disable zero_damaged_pages and statement_timeout in
the autovac launcher, not only workers. Now that the launcher can run
transactions, these settings could affect its behavior, and it seems
like the same arguments apply to the launcher as the workers.
When we added the ability for vacuum to skip heap pages by consulting the
visibility map, we made it just not update the reltuples/relpages
statistics if it skipped any pages. But this could leave us with extremely
out-of-date stats for a table that contains any unchanging areas,
especially for TOAST tables which never get processed by ANALYZE. In
particular this could result in autovacuum making poor decisions about when
to process the table, as in recent report from Florian Helmberger. And in
general it's a bad idea to not update the stats at all. Instead, use the
previous values of reltuples/relpages as an estimate of the tuple density
in unvisited pages. This approach results in a "moving average" estimate
of reltuples, which should converge to the correct value over multiple
VACUUM and ANALYZE cycles even when individual measurements aren't very
good.
This new method for updating reltuples is used by both VACUUM and ANALYZE,
with the result that we no longer need the grotty interconnections that
caused ANALYZE to not update the stats depending on what had happened
in the parent VACUUM command.
Also, fix the logic for skipping all-visible pages during VACUUM so that it
looks ahead rather than behind to decide what to do, as per a suggestion
from Greg Stark. This eliminates useless scanning of all-visible pages at
the start of the relation or just after a not-all-visible page. In
particular, the first few pages of the relation will not be invariably
included in the scanned pages, which seems to help in not overweighting
them in the reltuples estimate.
Back-patch to 8.4, where the visibility map was introduced.
This option turns off autovacuum, prevents non-super-user connections,
and enables oid setting hooks in the backend. The code continues to use
the old autoavacuum disable settings for servers with earlier catalog
versions.
This includes a catalog version bump to identify servers that support
the -b option.
Also avoid hardcoding the current default state by giving it the name
"on" and replace with a meaningful name that reflects its behaviour.
Coding only, no change in behaviour.
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
If a smart shutdown occurs just as a child is starting up, and the
child subsequently becomes a walsender, there is a race condition:
the postmaster might count the exstant backends, determine that there
is one normal backend, and wait for it to die off. Had the walsender
transition already occurred before the postmaster counted, it would
have proceeded with the shutdown.
To fix this, have each child that transforms into a walsender kick
the postmaster just after doing so, so that the state machine is
certain to advance.
Fujii Masao
This is no longer necessary, and might result in a situation where the
configuration file is reloaded (and everything seems OK) but a subsequent
restart of the database fails.
Per an observation from Fujii Masao.
This is advantageous because the BG writer is alive until much later in
the shutdown sequence than WAL writer; we want to make sure that it's
possible to shut off synchronous replication during a smart shutdown,
else it might not be possible to complete the shutdown at all.
Per very reasonable gripes from Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs.
1. Don't ignore query cancel interrupts. Instead, if the user asks to
cancel the query after we've already committed it, but before it's on
the standby, just emit a warning and let the COMMIT finish.
2. Don't ignore die interrupts (pg_terminate_backend or fast shutdown).
Instead, emit a warning message and close the connection without
acknowledging the commit. Other backends will still see the effect of
the commit, but there's no getting around that; it's too late to abort
at this point, and ignoring die interrupts altogether doesn't seem like
a good idea.
3. If synchronous_standby_names becomes empty, wake up all backends
waiting for synchronous replication to complete. Without this, someone
attempting to shut synchronous replication off could easily wedge the
entire system instead.
4. Avoid depending on the assumption that if a walsender updates
MyProc->syncRepState, we'll see the change even if we read it without
holding the lock. The window for this appears to be quite narrow (and
probably doesn't exist at all on machines with strong memory ordering)
but protecting against it is practically free, so do that.
5. Remove useless state SYNC_REP_MUST_DISCONNECT, which isn't needed and
doesn't actually do anything.
There's still some further work needed here to make the behavior of fast
shutdown plausible, but that looks complex, so I'm leaving it for a
separate commit. Review by Fujii Masao.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.
This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.
Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
Tracks one counter for each database, which is reset whenever
the statistics for any individual object inside the database is
reset, and one counter for the background writer.
Tomas Vondra, reviewed by Greg Smith
Waiting for relation locks can lead to starvation - it pins down an
autovacuum worker for as long as the lock is held. But if we're doing
an anti-wraparound vacuum, then we still wait; maintenance can no longer
be put off.
To assist with troubleshooting, if log_autovacuum_min_duration >= 0,
we log whenever an autovacuum or autoanalyze is skipped for this reason.
Per a gripe by Josh Berkus, and ensuing discussion.
When we need to insert a new entry and the queue is full, compact the
entire queue in the hopes of making room for the new entry. Doing this
on every insertion might worsen contention on BgWriterCommLock, but
when the queue it's full, it's far better than allowing the backend to
perform its own fsync, per testing by Greg Smith as reported in
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02665.php
Original idea from Greg Smith. Patch by me. Review by Chris Browne
and Greg Smith
Alvaro Herrera