The functions in slotfuncs.c don't exist in any released version,
but the changes to xlogfuncs.c represent backward-incompatibilities.
Per discussion, we're hoping that the queries using these functions
are few enough and simple enough that this won't cause too much
breakage for users.
Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and further modified
by me.
Since the temporary server started by "make check" uses "trust"
authentication, another user on the same machine could connect to it
as database superuser, and then potentially exploit the privileges of
the operating-system user who started the tests. We should change
the testing procedures to prevent this risk; but discussion is required
about the best way to do that, as well as more testing than is practical
for an undisclosed security problem. Besides, the same issue probably
affects some user-written test harnesses. So for the moment, we'll just
warn people against using "make check" when there are untrusted users on
the same machine.
In passing, remove some ancient advice that suggested making the
regression testing subtree world-writable if you'd built as root.
That looks dangerously insecure in modern contexts, and anyway we
should not be encouraging people to build Postgres as root.
Security: CVE-2014-0067
The primary role of PL validators is to be called implicitly during
CREATE FUNCTION, but they are also normal functions that a user can call
explicitly. Add a permissions check to each validator to ensure that a
user cannot use explicit validator calls to achieve things he could not
otherwise achieve. Back-patch to 8.4 (all supported versions).
Non-core procedural language extensions ought to make the same two-line
change to their own validators.
Andres Freund, reviewed by Tom Lane and Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2014-0061
Granting a role without ADMIN OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee
from adding or removing members from the granted role. Issuing SET ROLE
before the GRANT bypassed that, because the role itself had an implicit
right to add or remove members. Plug that hole by recognizing that
implicit right only when the session user matches the current role.
Additionally, do not recognize it during a security-restricted operation
or during execution of a SECURITY DEFINER function. The restriction on
SECURITY DEFINER is not security-critical. However, it seems best for a
user testing his own SECURITY DEFINER function to see the same behavior
others will see. Back-patch to 8.4 (all supported versions).
The SQL standards do not conflate roles and users as PostgreSQL does;
only SQL roles have members, and only SQL users initiate sessions. An
application using PostgreSQL users and roles as SQL users and roles will
never attempt to grant membership in the role that is the session user,
so the implicit right to add or remove members will never arise.
The security impact was mostly that a role member could revoke access
from others, contrary to the wishes of his own grantor. Unapproved role
member additions are less notable, because the member can still largely
achieve that by creating a view or a SECURITY DEFINER function.
Reviewed by Andres Freund and Tom Lane. Reported, independently, by
Jonas Sundman and Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2014-0060
Make a bit more noise about the timeout-interrupt bug. Also, remove the
release note entry for commit 423e1211a; that patch fixed a problem
introduced post-9.3.2, so there's no need to document it in the release
notes.
This documentation never got the word about the existence of check-world or
installcheck-world. Revise to recommend use of those, and document all the
subsidiary test suites. Do some minor wordsmithing elsewhere, too.
In passing, remove markup related to generation of plain-text regression
test instructions, since we don't do that anymore.
Back-patch to 9.1 where check-world was added. (installcheck-world exists
in 9.0; but since check-world doesn't, this patch would need additional
work to cover that branch, and it doesn't seem worth the effort.)
The documentation suggested using "echo | psql", but not the often-superior
alternative of a here-document. Also, be more direct about suggesting
that people avoid -c for multiple commands. Per discussion.
Previously we were piggybacking on transaction ID parameters to freeze
multixacts; but since there isn't necessarily any relationship between
rates of Xid and multixact consumption, this turns out not to be a good
idea.
Therefore, we now have multixact-specific freezing parameters:
vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age: when to remove multis as we come across
them in vacuum (default to 5 million, i.e. early in comparison to Xid's
default of 50 million)
vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age: when to force whole-table scans
instead of scanning only the pages marked as not all visible in
visibility map (default to 150 million, same as for Xids). Whichever of
both which reaches the 150 million mark earlier will cause a whole-table
scan.
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age: when for cause emergency,
uninterruptible whole-table scans (default to 400 million, double as
that for Xids). This means there shouldn't be more frequent emergency
vacuuming than previously, unless multixacts are being used very
rapidly.
Backpatch to 9.3 where multixacts were made to persist enough to require
freezing. To avoid an ABI break in 9.3, VacuumStmt has a couple of
fields in an unnatural place, and StdRdOptions is split in two so that
the newly added fields can go at the end.
Patch by me, reviewed by Robert Haas, with additional input from Andres
Freund and Tom Lane.
We have a practice of providing a "bread crumb" trail between the minor
versions where the migration section actually tells you to do something.
Historically that was just plain text, eg, "see the release notes for
9.2.4"; but if you're using a browser or PDF reader, it's a lot nicer
if it's a live hyperlink. So use "<xref>" instead. Any argument against
doing this vanished with the recent decommissioning of plain-text release
notes.
Vik Fearing
Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
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
New checks include input, month/day/time internal adjustments, addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and negation. Also adjust docs to
correctly specify interval size in bytes.
Report from Rok Kralj
This doesn't work for prepared queries, but it's not too easy to get
the information in that case and there's some debate as to exactly
what the right thing to measure is, so just do this for now.
Andreas Karlsson, with slight doc changes by me.
This patch adds an option, huge_tlb_pages, which allows requesting the
shared memory segment to be allocated using huge pages, by using the
MAP_HUGETLB flag in mmap(). This can improve performance.
The default is 'try', which means that we will attempt using huge pages,
and fall back to non-huge pages if it doesn't work. Currently, only Linux
has MAP_HUGETLB. On other platforms, the default 'try' behaves the same as
'off'.
In the passing, don't try to round the mmap() size to a multiple of
pagesize. mmap() doesn't require that, and there's no particular reason for
PostgreSQL to do that either. When using MAP_HUGETLB, however, round the
request size up to nearest 2MB boundary. This is to work around a bug in
some Linux kernel versions, but also to avoid wasting memory, because the
kernel will round the size up anyway.
Many people were involved in writing this patch, including Christian Kruse,
Richard Poole, Abhijit Menon-Sen, reviewed by Peter Geoghegan, Andres Freund
and me.
Robert Haas