This is necessary so that REASSIGN OWNED does the right thing with
composite types, to wit, that it also alters ownership of the type's
pg_class entry -- previously, the pg_class entry remained owned by the
original user, which caused later other failures such as the new owner's
inability to use ALTER TYPE to rename an attribute of the affected
composite. Also, if the original owner is later dropped, the pg_class
entry becomes owned by a non-existant user which is bogus.
To fix, create a new routine AlterTypeOwner_oid which knows whether to
pass the request to ATExecChangeOwner or deal with it directly, and use
that in shdepReassignOwner rather than calling AlterTypeOwnerInternal
directly. AlterTypeOwnerInternal is now simpler in that it only
modifies the pg_type entry and recurses to handle a possible array type;
higher-level tasks are handled by either AlterTypeOwner directly or
AlterTypeOwner_oid.
I took the opportunity to add a few more objects to the test rig for
REASSIGN OWNED, so that more cases are exercised. Additional ones could
be added for superuser-only-ownable objects (such as FDWs and event
triggers) but I didn't want to push my luck by adding a new superuser to
the tests on a backpatchable bug fix.
Per bug #13666 reported by Chris Pacejo.
This is a backpatch of commit 756e7b4c9d to branches 9.1 -- 9.4.
When REASSIGN and ALTER OWNER TO are used, both the object owner and ACL
list should be changed from the old owner to the new owner. This patch
fixes types, foreign data wrappers, and foreign servers to change their
ACL list properly; they already changed owners properly.
Report by Alexey Bashtanov
This is a backpatch of commit 59367fdf97 (for bug #9923) by Bruce
Momjian to branches 9.1 - 9.4; it wasn't backpatched originally out of
concerns that it would create a backwards compatibility problem, but per
discussion related to bug #13666 that turns out to have been misguided.
(Therefore, the entry in the 9.5 release notes should be removed.)
Note that 9.1 didn't have privileges on types (which were introduced by
commit 729205571e), so this commit only changes foreign-data related
objects in that branch.
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151216224004.GL2618@alvherre.pgsqlhttp://www.postgresql.org/message-id/10227.1450373793@sss.pgh.pa.us
psql offered USING, WHERE, and SET in this context, but SET is not a valid
possibility here. Seems to have been a thinko in commit f5ab0a14ea
which added DELETE's USING option.
Turns out we must set rl_basic_word_break_characters *before* we call
rl_initialize() the first time, because it will quietly copy that value
elsewhere --- but only on the first call. (Love these undocumented
dependencies.) I broke this yesterday in commit 2ec477dc8108339d;
like that commit, back-patch to all active branches. Per report from
Pavel Stehule.
It emerges that libreadline doesn't notice terminal window size change
events unless they occur while collecting input. This is easy to stumble
over if you resize the window while using a pager to look at query output,
but it can be demonstrated without any pager involvement. The symptom is
that queries exceeding one line are misdisplayed during subsequent input
cycles, because libreadline has the wrong idea of the screen dimensions.
The safest, simplest way to fix this is to call rl_reset_screen_size()
just before calling readline(). That causes an extra ioctl(TIOCGWINSZ)
for every command; but since it only happens when reading from a tty, the
performance impact should be negligible. A more valid objection is that
this still leaves a tiny window during entry to readline() wherein delivery
of SIGWINCH will be missed; but the practical consequences of that are
probably negligible. In any case, there doesn't seem to be any good way to
avoid the race, since readline exposes no functions that seem safe to call
from a generic signal handler --- rl_reset_screen_size() certainly isn't.
It turns out that we also need an explicit rl_initialize() call, else
rl_reset_screen_size() dumps core when called before the first readline()
call.
rl_reset_screen_size() is not present in old versions of libreadline,
so we need a configure test for that. (rl_initialize() is present at
least back to readline 4.0, so we won't bother with a test for it.)
We would need a configure test anyway since libedit's emulation of
libreadline doesn't currently include such a function. Fortunately,
libedit seems not to have any corresponding bug.
Merlin Moncure, adjusted a bit by me
Apparently, there are bugs in this code that cause it to loop endlessly.
That bug still needs more research, but in the meantime it's clear that
the loop is missing a check for interrupts so that it can be cancelled
timely.
Backpatch to 9.1 -- this has been missing since 49475aab8d.
If libpq ran out of memory while constructing the result set, it would hang,
waiting for more data from the server, which might never arrive. To fix,
distinguish between out-of-memory error and not-enough-data cases, and give
a proper error message back to the client on OOM.
There are still similar issues in handling COPY start messages, but let's
handle that as a separate patch.
Michael Paquier, Amit Kapila and me. Backpatch to all supported versions.
e3f4cfc7 introduced a LWLockHeldByMe() call, without the corresponding
Assert() surrounding it.
Spotted by Coverity.
Backpatch: 9.1+, like the previous commit
This has worked that way for a long time, maybe always, but you would
not have known it from the documentation. Also back-patch the notes
I added to HEAD earlier today about behavior of the "-f -" switch,
which likewise have been valid for many releases.
Changing the tablespace of an unlogged relation did not WAL log the
creation and content of the init fork. Thus, after a standby is
promoted, unlogged relation cannot be accessed anymore, with errors
like:
ERROR: 58P01: could not open file "pg_tblspc/...": No such file or directory
Additionally the init fork was not synced to disk, independent of the
configured wal_level, a relatively small durability risk.
Investigation of that problem also brought to light that, even for
permanent relations, the creation of !main forks was not WAL logged,
i.e. no XLOG_SMGR_CREATE record were emitted. That mostly turns out not
to be a problem, because these files were created when the actual
relation data is copied; nonexistent files are not treated as an error
condition during replay. But that doesn't work for empty files, and
generally feels a bit haphazard. Luckily, outside init and main forks,
empty forks don't occur often or are not a problem.
Add the required WAL logging and syncing to disk.
Reported-By: Michael Paquier
Author: Michael Paquier and Andres Freund
Discussion: 20151210163230.GA11331@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.1, where unlogged relations were introduced
Recent releases of libxml2 do not provide error context reports for errors
detected at the very end of the input string. This appears to be a bug, or
at least an infelicity, introduced by the fix for libxml2's CVE-2015-7499.
We can hope that this behavioral change will get undone before too long;
but the security patch is likely to spread a lot faster/further than any
follow-on cleanup, which means this behavior is likely to be present in the
wild for some time to come. As a stopgap, add a variant regression test
expected-file that matches what you get with a libxml2 that acts this way.
As reported in bug #13809 by Alexander Ashurkov, the code for REASSIGN
OWNED hadn't gotten word about user mappings. Deal with them in the
same way default ACLs do, which is to ignore them altogether; they are
handled just fine by DROP OWNED. The other foreign object cases are
already handled correctly by both commands.
Also add a REASSIGN OWNED statement to foreign_data test to exercise the
foreign data objects. (The changes are just before the "cleanup" phase,
so it shouldn't remove any existing live test.)
Reported by Alexander Ashurkov, then independently by Jaime Casanova.
At the end of crash recovery, unlogged relations are reset to the empty
state, using their init fork as the template. The init fork is copied to
the main fork without going through shared buffers. Unfortunately WAL
replay so far has not necessarily flushed writes from shared buffers to
disk at that point. In normal crash recovery, and before the
introduction of 'fast promotions' in fd4ced523 / 9.3, the
END_OF_RECOVERY checkpoint flushes the buffers out in time. But with
fast promotions that's not the case anymore.
To fix, force WAL writes targeting the init fork to be flushed
immediately (using the new FlushOneBuffer() function). In 9.5+ that
flush can centrally be triggered from the code dealing with restoring
full page writes (XLogReadBufferForRedoExtended), in earlier releases
that responsibility is in the hands of XLOG_HEAP_NEWPAGE's replay
function.
Backpatch to 9.1, even if this currently is only known to trigger in
9.3+. Flushing earlier is more robust, and it is advantageous to keep
the branches similar.
Typical symptoms of this bug are errors like
'ERROR: index "..." contains unexpected zero page at block 0'
shortly after promoting a node.
Reported-By: Thom Brown
Author: Andres Freund and Michael Paquier
Discussion: 20150326175024.GJ451@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.1-
In commit 1ea0c73c2 I added a section to user-manag.sgml about how to drop
roles that own objects; but as pointed out by Stephen Frost, I neglected
that shared objects (databases or tablespaces) may need special treatment.
Fix that. Back-patch to supported versions, like the previous patch.
We tried to fetch statistics data from the index metapage, which does not
work if the index isn't actually present. If the index is hypothetical,
instead extrapolate some plausible internal statistics based on the index
page count provided by the index-advisor plugin.
There was already some code in gincostestimate() to invent internal stats
in this way, but since it was only meant as a stopgap for pre-9.1 GIN
indexes that hadn't been vacuumed since upgrading, it was pretty crude.
If we want it to support index advisors, we should try a little harder.
A small amount of testing says that it's better to estimate the entry pages
as 90% of the index, not 100%. Also, estimating the number of entries
(keys) as equal to the heap tuple count could be wildly wrong in either
direction. Instead, let's estimate 100 entries per entry page.
Perhaps someday somebody will want the index advisor to be able to provide
these numbers more directly, but for the moment this should serve.
Problem report and initial patch by Julien Rouhaud; modified by me to
invent less-bogus internal statistics. Back-patch to all supported
branches, since we've supported index advisors since 9.0.
The previous coding could overrun the provided buffer size for a very large
input, or lose precision for a very small input. Adopt the methodology
that's been in use in the equivalent backend code for a long time.
Per private report from Bas van Schaik. Back-patch to all supported
branches.
Failure to initially palloc the comboCids array, or to realloc it bigger
when needed, left combocid's data structures in an inconsistent state that
would cause trouble if the top transaction continues to execute. Noted
while examining a user complaint about the amount of memory used for this.
(There's not much we can do about that, but it does point up that repalloc
failure has a non-negligible chance of occurring here.)
In HEAD/9.5, also avoid possible invocation of memcpy() with a null pointer
in SerializeComboCIDState; cf commit 13bba0227.
PQhost() can return NULL in non-error situations, namely when a Unix-socket
connection has been selected by default. That behavior is a tad debatable
perhaps, but for the moment we should make sure that psql copes with it.
Unfortunately, do_connect() failed to: it could pass a NULL pointer to
strcmp(), resulting in crashes on most platforms. This was reported as a
security issue by ChenQin of Topsec Security Team, but the consensus of
the security list is that it's just a garden-variety bug with no security
implications.
For paranoia's sake, I made the keep_password test not trust PQuser or
PQport either, even though I believe those will never return NULL given
a valid PGconn.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Also fix getErrorText() to return the right error string on failure.
This behavior now matches that of other operating systems.
Report by Noah Misch
Backpatch through 9.1
The POSIX standard for tar headers requires archive member sizes to be
printed in octal with at most 11 digits, limiting the representable file
size to 8GB. However, GNU tar and apparently most other modern tars
support a convention in which oversized values can be stored in base-256,
allowing any practical file to be a tar member. Adopt this convention
to remove two limitations:
* pg_dump with -Ft output format failed if the contents of any one table
exceeded 8GB.
* pg_basebackup failed if the data directory contained any file exceeding
8GB. (This would be a fatal problem for installations configured with a
table segment size of 8GB or more, and it has also been seen to fail when
large core dump files exist in the data directory.)
File sizes under 8GB are still printed in octal, so that no compatibility
issues are created except in cases that would have failed entirely before.
In addition, this patch fixes several bugs in the same area:
* In 9.3 and later, we'd defined tarCreateHeader's file-size argument as
size_t, which meant that on 32-bit machines it would write a corrupt tar
header for file sizes between 4GB and 8GB, even though no error was raised.
This broke both "pg_dump -Ft" and pg_basebackup for such cases.
* pg_restore from a tar archive would fail on tables of size between 4GB
and 8GB, on machines where either "size_t" or "unsigned long" is 32 bits.
This happened even with an archive file not affected by the previous bug.
* pg_basebackup would fail if there were files of size between 4GB and 8GB,
even on 64-bit machines.
* In 9.3 and later, "pg_basebackup -Ft" failed entirely, for any file size,
on 64-bit big-endian machines.
In view of these potential data-loss bugs, back-patch to all supported
branches, even though removal of the documented 8GB limit might otherwise
be considered a new feature rather than a bug fix.
The previous way of reconstructing check constraints was to do a separate
"ALTER TABLE ONLY tab ADD CONSTRAINT" for each table in an inheritance
hierarchy. However, that way has no hope of reconstructing the check
constraints' own inheritance properties correctly, as pointed out in
bug #13779 from Jan Dirk Zijlstra. What we should do instead is to do
a regular "ALTER TABLE", allowing recursion, at the topmost table that
has a particular constraint, and then suppress the work queue entries
for inherited instances of the constraint.
Annoyingly, we'd tried to fix this behavior before, in commit 5ed6546cf,
but we failed to notice that it wasn't reconstructing the pg_constraint
field values correctly.
As long as I'm touching pg_get_constraintdef_worker anyway, tweak it to
always schema-qualify the target table name; this seems like useful backup
to the protections installed by commit 5f173040.
In HEAD/9.5, get rid of get_constraint_relation_oids, which is now unused.
(I could alternatively have modified it to also return conislocal, but that
seemed like a pretty single-purpose API, so let's not pretend it has some
other use.) It's unused in the back branches as well, but I left it in
place just in case some third-party code has decided to use it.
In HEAD/9.5, also rename pg_get_constraintdef_string to
pg_get_constraintdef_command, as the previous name did nothing to explain
what that entry point did differently from others (and its comment was
equally useless). Again, that change doesn't seem like material for
back-patching.
I did a bit of re-pgindenting in tablecmds.c in HEAD/9.5, as well.
Otherwise, back-patch to all supported branches.
Per buildfarm member anchovy, 2.6.0 exists in the wild now.
Hopefully it works with Postgres; if not, we'll have to do something
about that, but in any case claiming it's "too old" is pretty silly.
div_var_fast() postpones propagating carries in the same way as mul_var(),
so it has the same corner-case overflow risk we fixed in 246693e5ae,
namely that the size of the carries has to be accounted for when setting
the threshold for executing a carry propagation step. We've not devised
a test case illustrating the brokenness, but the required fix seems clear
enough. Like the previous fix, back-patch to all active branches.
Dean Rasheed
Normally ruleutils prints a whole-row Var as "foo.*". We already knew that
that doesn't work at top level of a SELECT list, because the parser would
treat the "*" as a directive to expand the reference into separate columns,
not a whole-row Var. However, Joshua Yanovski points out in bug #13776
that the same thing happens at top level of a ROW() construct; and some
nosing around in the parser shows that the same is true in VALUES().
Hence, apply the same workaround already devised for the SELECT-list case,
namely to add a forced cast to the appropriate rowtype in these cases.
(The alternative of just printing "foo" was rejected because it is
difficult to avoid ambiguity against plain columns named "foo".)
Back-patch to all supported branches.
In commit a5ec86a7c7 I wrote a quick hack
that reduced the number of TeX string pool entries created while converting
our documentation to PDF form. That held the fort for awhile, but as of
HEAD we're back up against the same limitation. It turns out that the
original coding of \FlowObjectSetup actually results in *three* string pool
entries being generated for every "flow object" (that is, potential
cross-reference target) in the documentation, and my previous hack only got
rid of one of them. With a little more care, we can reduce the string
count to one per flow object plus one per actually-cross-referenced flow
object (about 115000 + 5000 as of current HEAD); that should work until
the documentation volume roughly doubles from where it is today.
As a not-incidental side benefit, this change also causes pdfjadetex to
stop emitting unreferenced hyperlink anchors (bookmarks) into the PDF file.
It had been making one willy-nilly for every flow object; now it's just one
per actually-cross-referenced object. This results in close to a 2X
savings in PDF file size. We will still want to run the output through
"jpdftweak" to get it to be compressed; but we no longer need removal of
unreferenced bookmarks, so we might be able to find a quicker tool for
that step.
Although the failure only affects HEAD and US-format output at the moment,
9.5 cannot be more than a few pages short of failing likewise, so it
will inevitably fail after a few rounds of minor-version release notes.
I don't have a lot of faith that we'll never hit the limit in the older
branches; and anyway it would be nice to get rid of jpdftweak across the
board. Therefore, back-patch to all supported branches.
At least OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Windows don't support it. This repairs
pg_ctl for listen_addresses='0.0.0.0' and listen_addresses='::'. Since
pg_ctl prefers to test a Unix-domain socket, Windows users are most
likely to need this change. Back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions).
This could change pg_ctl interaction with loopback-interface firewall
rules. Therefore, in 9.4 and earlier (released branches), activate the
change only on known-affected platforms.
Reported (bug #13611) and designed by Kondo Yuta.
Lookahead and lookbehind constraints aren't allowed to contain backrefs,
and parentheses within them are always considered non-capturing. Or so
says the manual. But the regexp parser forgot about these rules once
inside a parenthesized subexpression, so that constructs like (\w)(?=(\1))
were accepted (but then not correctly executed --- a case like this acted
like (\w)(?=\w), without any enforcement that the two \w's match the same
text). And in (?=((foo))) the innermost parentheses would be counted as
capturing parentheses, though no text would ever be captured for them.
To fix, properly pass down the "type" argument to the recursive invocation
of parse().
Back-patch to all supported branches; it was agreed that silent
misexecution of such patterns is worse than throwing an error, even though
new errors in minor releases are generally not desirable.
On insert the CheckForSerializableConflictIn() test was performed
before the page(s) which were going to be modified had been locked
(with an exclusive buffer content lock). If another process
acquired a relation SIReadLock on the heap and scanned to a page on
which an insert was going to occur before the page was so locked,
a rw-conflict would be missed, which could allow a serialization
anomaly to be missed. The window between the check and the page
lock was small, so the bug was generally not noticed unless there
was high concurrency with multiple processes inserting into the
same table.
This was reported by Peter Bailis as bug #11732, by Sean Chittenden
as bug #13667, and by others.
The race condition was eliminated in heap_insert() by moving the
check down below the acquisition of the buffer lock, which had been
the very next statement. Because of the loop locking and unlocking
multiple buffers in heap_multi_insert() a check was added after all
inserts were completed. The check before the start of the inserts
was left because it might avoid a large amount of work to detect a
serialization anomaly before performing the all of the inserts and
the related WAL logging.
While investigating this bug, other SSI bugs which were even harder
to hit in practice were noticed and fixed, an unnecessary check
(covered by another check, so redundant) was removed from
heap_update(), and comments were improved.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Kevin Grittner and Thomas Munro
Instead, use transaction abort. Given an unlucky bout of latency, the
timeout would cancel the RESET itself. Buildfarm members gharial,
lapwing, mereswine, shearwater, and sungazer witness that. Back-patch
to 9.1 (all supported versions). The query_canceled test still could
timeout before entering its subtransaction; for whatever reason, that
has yet to happen on the buildfarm.
pg_regprefix was doing nothing with lookahead constraints, which would
be fine if it were the right kind of nothing, but it isn't: we have to
terminate our search for a fixed prefix, not just pretend the LACON arc
isn't there. Otherwise, if the current state has both a LACON outarc and a
single plain-color outarc, we'd falsely conclude that the color represents
an addition to the fixed prefix, and generate an extracted index condition
that restricts the indexscan too much. (See added regression test case.)
Terminating the search is conservative: we could traverse the LACON arc
(thus assuming that the constraint can be satisfied at runtime) and then
examine the outarcs of the linked-to state. But that would be a lot more
work than it seems worth, because writing a LACON followed by a single
plain character is a pretty silly thing to do.
This makes a difference only in rather contrived cases, but it's a bug,
so back-patch to all supported branches.
Revert our previous addition of "all" flags to copyins() and copyouts();
they're no longer needed, and were never anything but an unsightly hack.
Improve a couple of infelicities in the REG_DEBUG code for dumping
the NFA data structure, including adding code to count the total
number of states and arcs.
Add a couple of missed error checks.
Add some more documentation in the README file, and some regression tests
illustrating cases that exceeded the state-count limit and/or took
unreasonable amounts of time before this set of patches.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
This code previously counted the number of NFA states it created, and
complained if a limit was exceeded, so as to prevent bizarre regex patterns
from consuming unreasonable time or memory. That's fine as far as it went,
but the code paid no attention to how many arcs linked those states. Since
regexes can be contrived that have O(N) states but will need O(N^2) arcs
after fixempties() processing, it was still possible to blow out memory,
and take a long time doing it too. To fix, modify the bookkeeping to count
space used by both states and arcs.
I did not bother with including the "color map" in the accounting; it
can only grow to a few megabytes, which is not a lot in comparison to
what we're allowing for states+arcs (about 150MB on 64-bit machines
or half that on 32-bit machines).
Looking at some of the larger real-world regexes captured in the Tcl
regression test suite suggests that the most that is likely to be needed
for regexes found in the wild is under 10MB, so I believe that the current
limit has enough headroom to make it okay to keep it as a hard-wired limit.
In connection with this, redefine REG_ETOOBIG as meaning "regular
expression is too complex"; the previous wording of "nfa has too many
states" was already somewhat inapropos because of the error code's use
for stack depth overrun, and it was not very user-friendly either.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
The previous coding would create a new intermediate state every time it
wanted to interchange the ordering of two constraint arcs. Certain regex
features such as \Y can generate large numbers of parallel constraint arcs,
and if we needed to reorder the results of that, we created unreasonable
numbers of intermediate states. To improve matters, keep a list of
already-created intermediate states associated with the state currently
being considered by the outer loop; we can re-use such states to place all
the new arcs leading to the same destination or source.
I also took the trouble to redefine push() and pull() to have a less risky
API: they no longer delete any state or arc that the caller might possibly
have a pointer to, except for the specifically-passed constraint arc.
This reduces the risk of re-introducing the same type of error seen in
the failed patch for CVE-2007-4772.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
The previous coding took something like O(N^4) time to fully process a
chain of N EMPTY arcs. We can't really do much better than O(N^2) because
we have to insert about that many arcs, but we can do lots better than
what's there now. The win comes partly from using mergeins() to amortize
de-duplication of arcs across multiple source states, and partly from
exploiting knowledge of the ordering of arcs for each state to avoid
looking at arcs we don't need to consider during the scan. We do have
to be a bit careful of the possible reordering of arcs introduced by
the sort-merge coding of the previous commit, but that's not hard to
deal with.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Change the singly-linked in-arc and out-arc lists to be doubly-linked,
so that arc deletion is constant time rather than having worst-case time
proportional to the number of other arcs on the connected states.
Modify the bulk arc transfer operations copyins(), copyouts(), moveins(),
moveouts() so that they use a sort-and-merge algorithm whenever there's
more than a small number of arcs to be copied or moved. The previous
method is O(N^2) in the number of arcs involved, because it performs
duplicate checking independently for each copied arc. The new method may
change the ordering of existing arcs for the destination state, but nothing
really cares about that.
Provide another bulk arc copying method mergeins(), which is unused as
of this commit but is needed for the next one. It basically is like
copyins(), but the source arcs might not all come from the same state.
Replace the O(N^2) bubble-sort algorithm used in carcsort() with a qsort()
call.
These changes greatly improve the performance of regex compilation for
large or complex regexes, at the cost of extra space for arc storage during
compilation. The original tradeoff was probably fine when it was made, but
now we care more about speed and less about memory consumption.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
It's possible to construct regular expressions that contain loops of
constraint arcs (that is, ^ $ AHEAD BEHIND or LACON arcs). There's no use
in fully traversing such a loop at execution, since you'd just end up in
the same NFA state without having consumed any input. Worse, such a loop
leads to infinite looping in the pullback/pushfwd stage of compilation,
because we keep pushing or pulling the same constraints around the loop
in a vain attempt to move them to the pre or post state. Such looping was
previously recognized in CVE-2007-4772; but the fix only handled the case
of trivial single-state loops (that is, a constraint arc leading back to
its source state) ... and not only that, it was incorrect even for that
case, because it broke the admittedly-not-very-clearly-stated API contract
of the pull() and push() subroutines. The first two regression test cases
added by this commit exhibit patterns that result in assertion failures
because of that (though there seem to be no ill effects in non-assert
builds). The other new test cases exhibit multi-state constraint loops;
in an unpatched build they will run until the NFA state-count limit is
exceeded.
To fix, remove the code added for CVE-2007-4772, and instead create a
general-purpose constraint-loop-breaking phase of regex compilation that
executes before we do pullback/pushfwd. Since we never need to traverse
a constraint loop fully, we can just break the loop at any chosen spot,
if we add clone states that can replicate any sequence of arc transitions
that would've traversed just part of the loop.
Also add some commentary clarifying why we have to have all these
machinations in the first place.
This class of problems has been known for some time --- we had a report
from Marc Mamin about two years ago, for example, and there are related
complaints in the Tcl bug tracker. I had discussed a fix of this kind
off-list with Henry Spencer, but didn't get around to doing something
about it until the issue was rediscovered by Greg Stark recently.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Postmaster child processes that aren't supposed to be attached to shared
memory were not bothering to close the shared memory mapping handle they
inherit from the postmaster process. That's mostly harmless, since the
handle vanishes anyway when the child process exits -- but the syslogger
process, if used, doesn't get killed and restarted during recovery from a
backend crash. That meant that Windows doesn't see the shared memory
mapping as becoming free, so it doesn't delete it and the postmaster is
unable to create a new one, resulting in failure to recover from crashes
whenever logging_collector is turned on.
Per report from Dmitry Vasilyev. It's a bit astonishing that we'd not
figured this out long ago, since it's been broken from the very beginnings
of out native Windows support; probably some previously-unexplained trouble
reports trace to this.
A secondary problem is that on Cygwin (perhaps only in older versions?),
exec() may not detach from the shared memory segment after all, in which
case these child processes did remain attached to shared memory, posing
the risk of an unexpected shared memory clobber if they went off the rails
somehow. That may be a long-gone bug, but we can deal with it now if it's
still live, by detaching within the infrastructure introduced here to deal
with closing the handle.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Tom Lane and Amit Kapila
pg_ctl start with -w previously relied on a heuristic that the postmaster
would surely always manage to create postmaster.pid within five seconds.
Unfortunately, that fails much more often than we would like on some of the
slower, more heavily loaded buildfarm members.
We have known for quite some time that we could remove the need for that
heuristic on Unix by using fork/exec instead of system() to launch the
postmaster. This allows us to know the exact PID of the postmaster, which
allows near-certain verification that the postmaster.pid file is the one
we want and not a leftover, and it also lets us use waitpid() to detect
reliably whether the child postmaster has exited or not.
What was blocking this change was not wanting to rewrite the Windows
version of start_postmaster() to avoid use of CMD.EXE. That's doable
in theory but would require fooling about with stdout/stderr redirection,
and getting the handling of quote-containing postmaster switches to
stay the same might be rather ticklish. However, we realized that
we don't have to do that to fix the problem, because we can test
whether the shell process has exited as a proxy for whether the
postmaster is still alive. That doesn't allow an exact check of the
PID in postmaster.pid, but we're no worse off than before in that
respect; and we do get to get rid of the heuristic about how long the
postmaster might take to create postmaster.pid.
On Unix, this change means that a second "pg_ctl start -w" immediately
after another such command will now reliably fail, whereas previously
it would succeed if done within two seconds of the earlier command.
Since that's a saner behavior anyway, it's fine. On Windows, the case can
still succeed within the same time window, since pg_ctl can't tell that the
earlier postmaster's postmaster.pid isn't the pidfile it is looking for.
To ensure stable test results on Windows, we can insert a short sleep into
the test script for pg_ctl, ensuring that the existing pidfile looks stale.
This hack can be removed if we ever do rewrite start_postmaster(), but that
no longer seems like a high-priority thing to do.
Back-patch to all supported versions, both because the current behavior
is buggy and because we must do that if we want the buildfarm failures
to go away.
Tom Lane and Michael Paquier
In general one may have to run both REASSIGN OWNED and DROP OWNED to get
rid of all the dependencies of a role to be dropped. This was alluded to
in the REASSIGN OWNED man page, but not really spelled out in full; and in
any case the procedure ought to be documented in a more prominent place
than that. Add a section to the "Database Roles" chapter explaining this,
and do a bit of wordsmithing in the relevant commands' man pages.
The postmaster now checks every minute or so (worst case, at most two
minutes) that postmaster.pid is still there and still contains its own PID.
If not, it performs an immediate shutdown, as though it had received
SIGQUIT.
The original goal behind this change was to ensure that failed buildfarm
runs would get fully cleaned up, even if the test scripts had left a
postmaster running, which is not an infrequent occurrence. When the
buildfarm script removes a test postmaster's $PGDATA directory, its next
check on postmaster.pid will fail and cause it to exit. Previously, manual
intervention was often needed to get rid of such orphaned postmasters,
since they'd block new test postmasters from obtaining the expected socket
address.
However, by checking postmaster.pid and not something else, we can provide
additional robustness: manual removal of postmaster.pid is a frequent DBA
mistake, and now we can at least limit the damage that will ensue if a new
postmaster is started while the old one is still alive.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since we won't get the desired
improvement in buildfarm reliability otherwise.
Alvaro Herrera