For performance reasons a larger segment size than the default 16MB
can be useful. A larger segment size has two main benefits: Firstly,
in setups using archiving, it makes it easier to write scripts that
can keep up with higher amounts of WAL, secondly, the WAL has to be
written and synced to disk less frequently.
But at the same time large segment size are disadvantageous for
smaller databases. So far the segment size had to be configured at
compile time, often making it unrealistic to choose one fitting to a
particularly load. Therefore change it to a initdb time setting.
This includes a breaking changes to the xlogreader.h API, which now
requires the current segment size to be configured. For that and
similar reasons a number of binaries had to be taught how to recognize
the current segment size.
Author: Beena Emerson, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, David Steele, Kuntal Ghosh, Michael
Paquier, Peter Eisentraut, Robert Hass, Tushar Ahuja
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAOG9ApEAcQ--1ieKbhFzXSQPw_YLmepaa4hNdnY5+ZULpt81Mw@mail.gmail.com
The bug was caused by not re-reading the control file during crash
recovery restarts, which lead to an attempt to pfree() shared memory
contents. The fix is to re-read the control file, which seems good
anyway.
It's unclear as of this moment, whether we want to keep the
refactoring introduced in the commit referenced above, or come up with
an alternative approach. But fixing the bug in the mean time seems
like a good idea regardless.
A followup commit will introduce regression test coverage for crash
restarts.
Reported-By: Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14134.1505572349@sss.pgh.pa.us
Previously we read the control file in multiple places. But soon the
segment size will be configurable and stored in the control file, and
that needs to be available earlier than it currently is needed.
Instead of adding yet another place where it's read, refactor things
so there's a single processing of the control file during startup (in
EXEC_BACKEND that's every individual backend's startup).
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/20170913092828.aozd3gvvmw67gmyc@alap3.anarazel.de
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Previously they were defined using multiples of XLogSegSize.
Remove GUC_UNIT_XSEGS. Introduce GUC_UNIT_MB
Extracted from patch series on XLogSegSize infrastructure.
Beena Emerson
Assert-enabled build crashes but without asserts it works by wrong way:
it may not reset forcing full page write and preventing from starting
exclusive backup with the same name as cancelled.
Patch replaces pair of booleans
nonexclusive_backup_running/exclusive_backup_running to single enum to
correctly describe backup state.
Backpatch to 9.6 where bug was introduced
Reported-by: David Steele
Authors: Michael Paquier, David Steele
Reviewed-by: Anastasia Lubennikova
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/13/1068/
This introduces a new generic SASL authentication method, similar to the
GSS and SSPI methods. The server first tells the client which SASL
authentication mechanism to use, and then the mechanism-specific SASL
messages are exchanged in AuthenticationSASLcontinue and PasswordMessage
messages. Only SCRAM-SHA-256 is supported at the moment, but this allows
adding more SASL mechanisms in the future, without changing the overall
protocol.
Support for channel binding, aka SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS is left for later.
The SASLPrep algorithm, for pre-processing the password, is not yet
implemented. That could cause trouble, if you use a password with
non-ASCII characters, and a client library that does implement SASLprep.
That will hopefully be added later.
Authorization identities, as specified in the SCRAM-SHA-256 specification,
are ignored. SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION provides more or less the same
functionality, anyway.
If a user doesn't exist, perform a "mock" authentication, by constructing
an authentic-looking challenge on the fly. The challenge is derived from
a new system-wide random value, "mock authentication nonce", which is
created at initdb, and stored in the control file. We go through these
motions, in order to not give away the information on whether the user
exists, to unauthenticated users.
Bumps PG_CONTROL_VERSION, because of the new field in control file.
Patch by Michael Paquier and Heikki Linnakangas, reviewed at different
stages by Robert Haas, Stephen Frost, David Steele, Aleksander Alekseev,
and many others.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRbR3GmFYdedCAhzukfKrgBLTLtMvENOmPrVWREsZkF8g%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqSMXU35g%3DW9X74HVeQp0uvgJxvYOuA4A-A3M%2B0wfEBv-w%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/55192AFE.6080106@iki.fi
When the new GUC wal_consistency_checking is set to a non-empty value,
it triggers recording of additional full-page images, which are
compared on the standby against the results of applying the WAL record
(without regard to those full-page images). Allowable differences
such as hints are masked out, and the resulting pages are compared;
any difference results in a FATAL error on the standby.
Kuntal Ghosh, based on earlier patches by Michael Paquier and Heikki
Linnakangas. Extensively reviewed and revised by Michael Paquier and
by me, with additional reviews and comments from Amit Kapila, Álvaro
Herrera, Simon Riggs, and Peter Eisentraut.
Some background activity (like checkpoints, archive timeout, standby
snapshots) is not supposed to happen on an idle system. Unfortunately
so far it was not easy to determine when a system is idle, which
defeated some of the attempts to avoid redundant activity on an idle
system.
To make that easier, allow to make individual WAL insertions as not
being "important". By checking whether any important activity happened
since the last time an activity was performed, it now is easy to check
whether some action needs to be repeated.
Use the new facility for checkpoints, archive timeout and standby
snapshots.
The lack of a facility causes some issues in older releases, but in my
opinion the consequences (superflous checkpoints / archived segments)
aren't grave enough to warrant backpatching.
Author: Michael Paquier, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, David Steele, Amit Kapila, Kyotaro HORIGUCHI
Bug: #13685
Discussion:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151016203031.3019.72930@wrigleys.postgresql.orghttps://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqQcPqxEM3S735Bd2RzApNqSNJVietAC=6kfkYv_45dKwA@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: -
Previously non-exclusive backups had to be done using the replication protocol
and pg_basebackup. With this commit it's now possible to make them using
pg_start_backup/pg_stop_backup as well, as long as the backup program can
maintain a persistent connection to the database.
Doing this, backup_label and tablespace_map are returned as results from
pg_stop_backup() instead of being written to the data directory. This makes
the server safe from a crash during an ongoing backup, which can be a problem
with exclusive backups.
The old syntax of the functions remain and work exactly as before, but since the
new syntax is safer this should eventually be deprecated and removed.
Only reference documentation is included. The main section on backup still needs
to be rewritten to cover this, but since that is already scheduled for a separate
large rewrite, it's not included in this patch.
Reviewed by David Steele and Amit Kapila
In this mode, the master waits for the transaction to be applied on
the remote side, not just written to disk. That means that you can
count on a transaction started on the standby to see all commits
previously acknowledged by the master.
To make this work, the standby sends a reply after replaying each
commit record generated with synchronous_commit >= 'remote_apply'.
This introduces a small inefficiency: the extra replies will be sent
even by standbys that aren't the current synchronous standby. But
previously-existing synchronous_commit levels make no attempt at all
to optimize which replies are sent based on what the primary cares
about, so this is no worse, and at least avoids any extra replies for
people not using the feature at all.
Thomas Munro, reviewed by Michael Paquier and by me. Some additional
tweaks by me.
The distinction between "archive" and "hot_standby" existed only because
at the time "hot_standby" was added, there was some uncertainty about
stability. This is now a long time ago. We would like to move forward
with simplifying the replication configuration, but this distinction is
in the way, because a primary server cannot tell (without asking a
standby or predicting the future) which one of these would be the
appropriate level.
Pick a new name for the combined setting to make it clearer that it
covers all (non-logical) backup and replication uses. The old values
are still accepted but are converted internally.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>
2PC state info is written only to WAL at PREPARE, then read back from WAL at
COMMIT PREPARED/ABORT PREPARED. Prepared transactions that live past one bufmgr
checkpoint cycle will be written to disk in the same form as previously. Crash
recovery path is not altered. Measured performance gains of 50-100% for short
2PC transactions by completely avoiding writing files and fsyncing. Other
optimizations still available, further patches in related areas expected.
Stas Kelvich and heavily edited by Simon Riggs
Based upon earlier ideas and patches by Michael Paquier and Heikki Linnakangas,
a concrete example of how Postgres-XC has fed back ideas into PostgreSQL.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Jeff Janes and Andres Freund
Performance testing by Jesper Pedersen
This commit makes postmaster forcibly remove the files signaling
a standby promotion request. Otherwise, the existence of those files
can trigger a promotion too early, whether a user wants that or not.
This removal of files is usually unnecessary because they can exist
only during a few moments during a standby promotion. However
there is a race condition: if pg_ctl promote is executed and creates
the files during a promotion, the files can stay around even after
the server is brought up to new master. Then, if new standby starts
by using the backup taken from that master, the files can exist
at the server startup and should be removed in order to avoid
an unexpected promotion.
Back-patch to 9.1 where promote signal file was introduced.
Problem reported by Feike Steenbergen.
Original patch by Michael Paquier, modified by me.
Discussion: 20150528100705.4686.91426@wrigleys.postgresql.org
After the archiver dies, postmaster tries to start a new one immediately.
But previously this could happen only while server was running normally
even though archiving was enabled always (i.e., archive_mode was set to
always). So the archiver running during recovery could not restart soon
after it died. This is an oversight in commit ffd3774.
This commit changes reaper(), postmaster's signal handler to cleanup
after a child process dies, so that it tries to a new archiver even during
recovery if necessary.
Patch by me. Review by Alvaro Herrera.
Windows can't reliably restore symbolic links from a tar format, so
instead during backup start we create a tablespace_map file, which is
used by the restoring postgres to create the correct links in pg_tblspc.
The backup protocol also now has an option to request this file to be
included in the backup stream, and this is used by pg_basebackup when
operating in tar mode.
This is done on all platforms, not just Windows.
This means that pg_basebackup will not not work in tar mode against 9.4
and older servers, as this protocol option isn't implemented there.
Amit Kapila, reviewed by Dilip Kumar, with a little editing from me.
When implementing a replication solution ontop of logical decoding, two
related problems exist:
* How to safely keep track of replication progress
* How to change replication behavior, based on the origin of a row;
e.g. to avoid loops in bi-directional replication setups
The solution to these problems, as implemented here, consist out of
three parts:
1) 'replication origins', which identify nodes in a replication setup.
2) 'replication progress tracking', which remembers, for each
replication origin, how far replay has progressed in a efficient and
crash safe manner.
3) The ability to filter out changes performed on the behest of a
replication origin during logical decoding; this allows complex
replication topologies. E.g. by filtering all replayed changes out.
Most of this could also be implemented in "userspace", e.g. by inserting
additional rows contain origin information, but that ends up being much
less efficient and more complicated. We don't want to require various
replication solutions to reimplement logic for this independently. The
infrastructure is intended to be generic enough to be reusable.
This infrastructure also replaces the 'nodeid' infrastructure of commit
timestamps. It is intended to provide all the former capabilities,
except that there's only 2^16 different origins; but now they integrate
with logical decoding. Additionally more functionality is accessible via
SQL. Since the commit timestamp infrastructure has also been introduced
in 9.5 (commit 73c986add) changing the API is not a problem.
For now the number of origins for which the replication progress can be
tracked simultaneously is determined by the max_replication_slots
GUC. That GUC is not a perfect match to configure this, but there
doesn't seem to be sufficient reason to introduce a separate new one.
Bumps both catversion and wal page magic.
Author: Andres Freund, with contributions from Petr Jelinek and Craig Ringer
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Steve Singer
Discussion: 20150216002155.GI15326@awork2.anarazel.de,
20140923182422.GA15776@alap3.anarazel.de,
20131114172632.GE7522@alap2.anarazel.de
When newly-added GUC parameter, wal_compression, is on, the PostgreSQL server
compresses a full page image written to WAL when full_page_writes is on or
during a base backup. A compressed page image will be decompressed during WAL
replay. Turning this parameter on can reduce the WAL volume without increasing
the risk of unrecoverable data corruption, but at the cost of some extra CPU
spent on the compression during WAL logging and on the decompression during
WAL replay.
This commit changes the WAL format (so bumping WAL version number) so that
the one-byte flag indicating whether a full page image is compressed or not is
included in its header information. This means that the commit increases the
WAL volume one-byte per a full page image even if WAL compression is not used
at all. We can save that one-byte by borrowing one-bit from the existing field
like hole_offset in the header and using it as the flag, for example. But which
would reduce the code readability and the extensibility of the feature.
Per discussion, it's not worth paying those prices to save only one-byte, so we
decided to add the one-byte flag to the header.
This commit doesn't introduce any new compression algorithm like lz4.
Currently a full page image is compressed using the existing PGLZ algorithm.
Per discussion, we decided to use it at least in the first version of the
feature because there were no performance reports showing that its compression
ratio is unacceptably lower than that of other algorithm. Of course,
in the future, it's worth considering the support of other compression
algorithm for the better compression.
Rahila Syed and Michael Paquier, reviewed in various versions by myself,
Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Abhijit Menon-Sen and many others.
Instead of having a single knob (checkpoint_segments) that both triggers
checkpoints, and determines how many checkpoints to recycle, they are now
separate concerns. There is still an internal variable called
CheckpointSegments, which triggers checkpoints. But it no longer determines
how many segments to recycle at a checkpoint. That is now auto-tuned by
keeping a moving average of the distance between checkpoints (in bytes),
and trying to keep that many segments in reserve. The advantage of this is
that you can set max_wal_size very high, but the system won't actually
consume that much space if there isn't any need for it. The min_wal_size
sets a floor for that; you can effectively disable the auto-tuning behavior
by setting min_wal_size equal to max_wal_size.
The max_wal_size setting is now the actual target size of WAL at which a
new checkpoint is triggered, instead of the distance between checkpoints.
Previously, you could calculate the actual WAL usage with the formula
"(2 + checkpoint_completion_target) * checkpoint_segments + 1". With this
patch, you set the desired WAL usage with max_wal_size, and the system
calculates the appropriate CheckpointSegments with the reverse of that
formula. That's a lot more intuitive for administrators to set.
Reviewed by Amit Kapila and Venkata Balaji N.
Previously when the standby server failed to retrieve WAL files from any sources
(i.e., streaming replication, local pg_xlog directory or WAL archive), it always
waited for five seconds (hard-coded) before the next attempt. For example,
this is problematic in warm-standby because restore_command can fail
every five seconds even while new WAL file is expected to be unavailable for
a long time and flood the log files with its error messages.
This commit adds new parameter, wal_retrieve_retry_interval, to control that
wait time.
Alexey Vasiliev and Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and me.
Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.
There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.
This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.
For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.
The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.
Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.
xlog.c is huge, this makes it a little bit smaller, which is nice. Functions
related to putting together the WAL record are in xloginsert.c, and the
lower level stuff for managing WAL buffers and such are in xlog.c.
Also move the definition of XLogRecord to a separate header file. This
causes churn in the #includes of all the files that write WAL records, and
redo routines, but it avoids pulling in xlog.h into most places.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera, Andres Freund and Amit Kapila.
Commit 7dbb606938 added a new CHECKPOINT_FLUSH_ALL flag. As that
commit needed to be backpatched I didn't change the numeric values of
the existing flags as that could lead to nastly problems if any
external code issued checkpoints. That's not a concern on master, so
renumber them there.
Also add a comment about CHECKPOINT_FLUSH_ALL above
CreateCheckPoint().
CREATE DATABASE and ALTER DATABASE .. SET TABLESPACE copy the source
database directory on the filesystem level. To ensure the on disk
state is consistent they block out users of the affected database and
force a checkpoint to flush out all data to disk. Unfortunately, up to
now, that checkpoint didn't flush out dirty buffers from unlogged
relations.
That bug means there could be leftover dirty buffers in either the
template database, or the database in its old location. Leading to
problems when accessing relations in an inconsistent state; and to
possible problems during shutdown in the SET TABLESPACE case because
buffers belonging files that don't exist anymore are flushed.
This was reported in bug #10675 by Maxim Boguk.
Fix by Pavan Deolasee, modified somewhat by me. Reviewed by MauMau and
Fujii Masao.
Backpatch to 9.1 where unlogged tables were introduced.
I left the GUC in place for the beta period, so that people could experiment
with different values. No-one's come up with any data that a different value
would be better under some circumstances, so rather than try to document to
users what the GUC, let's just hard-code the current value, 8.
This is primarily useful for the upcoming pg_xlogdump --stats feature,
but also allows to remove some duplicated code in the rmgr_desc
routines.
Due to the separation and harmonization, the output of dipsplayed
records changes somewhat. But since this isn't enduser oriented
content that's ok.
It's potentially desirable to further change pg_xlogdump's display of
records. It previously wasn't possible to show the record type
separately from the description forcing it to be in the last
column. But that's better done in a separate commit.
Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen, slightly editorialized by me
Reviewed-By: Álvaro Herrera, Andres Freund, and Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: 20140604104716.GA3989@toroid.org
log_newpage is used by many indexams, in addition to heap, but for
historical reasons it's always been part of the heapam rmgr. Starting with
9.3, we have another WAL record type for logging an image of a page,
XLOG_FPI. Simplify things by moving log_newpage and log_newpage_buffer to
xlog.c, and switch to using the XLOG_FPI record type.
Bump the WAL version number because the code to replay the old HEAP_NEWPAGE
records is removed.
The special feature the XLogInsert slots had over regular LWLocks is the
insertingAt value that was updated atomically with releasing backends
waiting on it. Add new functions to the LWLock API to do that, and replace
the slots with LWLocks. This reduces the amount of duplicated code.
(There's still some duplication, but at least it's all in lwlock.c now.)
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
When a row is updated, and the new tuple version is put on the same page as
the old one, only WAL-log the part of the new tuple that's not identical to
the old. This saves significantly on the amount of WAL that needs to be
written, in the common case that most fields are not modified.
Amit Kapila, with a lot of back and forth with me, Robert Haas, and others.
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.
Replication slots are a crash-safe data structure which can be created
on either a master or a standby to prevent premature removal of
write-ahead log segments needed by a standby, as well as (with
hot_standby_feedback=on) pruning of tuples whose removal would cause
replication conflicts. Slots have some advantages over existing
techniques, as explained in the documentation.
In a few places, we refer to the type of replication slots introduced
by this patch as "physical" slots, because forthcoming patches for
logical decoding will also have slots, but with somewhat different
properties.
Andres Freund and Robert Haas
This allows ending recovery as a consistent state has been reached. Without
this, there was no easy way to e.g restore an online backup, without
replaying any extra WAL after the backup ended.
MauMau and me.
In ordinary operation, VACUUM must be careful to take a cleanup lock on
each leaf page of a btree index; this ensures that no indexscans could
still be "in flight" to heap tuples due to be deleted. (Because of
possible index-tuple motion due to concurrent page splits, it's not enough
to lock only the pages we're deleting index tuples from.) In Hot Standby,
the WAL replay process must likewise lock every leaf page. There were
several bugs in the code for that:
* The replay scan might come across unused, all-zero pages in the index.
While btree_xlog_vacuum itself did the right thing (ie, nothing) with
such pages, xlogutils.c supposed that such pages must be corrupt and
would throw an error. This accounts for various reports of replication
failures with "PANIC: WAL contains references to invalid pages". To
fix, add a ReadBufferMode value that instructs XLogReadBufferExtended
not to complain when we're doing this.
* btree_xlog_vacuum performed the extra locking if standbyState ==
STANDBY_SNAPSHOT_READY, but that's not the correct test: we won't open up
for hot standby queries until the database has reached consistency, and
we don't want to do the extra locking till then either, for fear of reading
corrupted pages (which bufmgr.c would complain about). Fix by exporting a
new function from xlog.c that will report whether we're actually in hot
standby replay mode.
* To ensure full coverage of the index in the replay scan, btvacuumscan
would emit a dummy WAL record for the last page of the index, if no
vacuuming work had been done on that page. However, if the last page
of the index is all-zero, that would result in corruption of said page,
since the functions called on it weren't prepared to handle that case.
There's no need to lock any such pages, so change the logic to target
the last normal leaf page instead.
The first two of these bugs were diagnosed by Andres Freund, the other one
by me. Fixes based on ideas from Heikki Linnakangas and myself.
This has been wrong since Hot Standby was introduced, so back-patch to 9.0.
WAL records of hint bit updates is useful to tools that want to examine
which pages have been modified. In particular, this is required to make
the pg_rewind tool safe (without checksums).
This can also be used to test how much extra WAL-logging would occur if
you enabled checksums, without actually enabling them (which you can't
currently do without re-initdb'ing).
Sawada Masahiko, docs by Samrat Revagade. Reviewed by Dilip Kumar, with
further changes by me.
Andres Freund