Logical decoding should not publish anything about tables created as
part of a heap rewrite during DDL. Those tables don't exist externally,
so consumers of logical decoding cannot do anything sensible with that
information. In ab28feae2b, we worked
around this for built-in logical replication, but that was hack.
This is a more proper fix: We mark such transient heaps using the new
field pg_class.relwrite, linking to the original relation OID. By
default, we ignore them in logical decoding before they get to the
output plugin. Optionally, a plugin can register their interest in
getting such changes, if they handle DDL specially, in which case the
new field will help them get information about the actual table.
Reviewed-by: Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>
Noticed while playing with changes that mess with the bootstrap
sequence; the operations patched here failed to emit anything, leading
the developer to think that the bug was in the previous operation that
did emit a message.
If we restrict unique constraints on partitioned tables so that they
must always include the partition key, then our standard approach to
unique indexes already works --- each unique key is forced to exist
within a single partition, so enforcing the unique restriction in each
index individually is enough to have it enforced globally. Therefore we
can implement unique indexes on partitions by simply removing a few
restrictions (and adding others.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171222212921.hi6hg6pem2w2t36z@alvherre.pgsql
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171229230607.3iib6b62fn3uaf47@alvherre.pgsql
Reviewed-by: Simon Riggs, Jesper Pedersen, Peter Eisentraut, Jaime
Casanova, Amit Langote
To make this work, tuplesort.c and logtape.c must also support
parallelism, so this patch adds that infrastructure and then applies
it to the particular case of parallel btree index builds. Testing
to date shows that this can often be 2-3x faster than a serial
index build.
The model for deciding how many workers to use is fairly primitive
at present, but it's better than not having the feature. We can
refine it as we get more experience.
Peter Geoghegan with some help from Rushabh Lathia. While Heikki
Linnakangas is not an author of this patch, he wrote other patches
without which this feature would not have been possible, and
therefore the release notes should possibly credit him as an author
of this feature. Reviewed by Claudio Freire, Heikki Linnakangas,
Thomas Munro, Tels, Amit Kapila, me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAM3SWZQKM=Pzc=CAHzRixKjp2eO5Q0Jg1SoFQqeXFQ647JiwqQ@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=AxWqDoVvGU7dq856S4r6sJAj6DBn7VMtigkB33N5eyg@mail.gmail.com
When CREATE INDEX is run on a partitioned table, create catalog entries
for an index on the partitioned table (which is just a placeholder since
the table proper has no data of its own), and recurse to create actual
indexes on the existing partitions; create them in future partitions
also.
As a convenience gadget, if the new index definition matches some
existing index in partitions, these are picked up and used instead of
creating new ones. Whichever way these indexes come about, they become
attached to the index on the parent table and are dropped alongside it,
and cannot be dropped on isolation unless they are detached first.
To support pg_dump'ing these indexes, add commands
CREATE INDEX ON ONLY <table>
(which creates the index on the parent partitioned table, without
recursing) and
ALTER INDEX ATTACH PARTITION
(which is used after the indexes have been created individually on each
partition, to attach them to the parent index). These reconstruct prior
database state exactly.
Reviewed-by: (in alphabetical order) Peter Eisentraut, Robert Haas, Amit
Langote, Jesper Pedersen, Simon Riggs, David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171113170646.gzweigyrgg6pwsg4@alvherre.pgsql
Flex generates a lot of functions that are not actually used. In order
to avoid coverage figures being ruined by that, mark up the part of the
.l files where the generated code appears by lcov exclusion markers.
That way, lcov will typically only reported on coverage for the .l file,
which is under our control, but not for the .c file.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Remove gratuitous differences in the process names shown in
pg_stat_activity.backend_type and the ps output.
Reviewed-by: Takayuki Tsunakawa <tsunakawa.takay@jp.fujitsu.com>
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 parenthesized style has only been used in a few modules. Change
that to use the style that is predominant across the whole tree.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Ryan Murphy <ryanfmurphy@gmail.com>
This is a mechanical change in preparation for a later commit that
will change the layout of TupleDesc. Introducing a macro to abstract
the details of where attributes are stored will allow us to change
that in separate step and revise it in future.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
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, you could write _null_ in a BKI DATA line for a column that's
supposed to be NOT NULL and initdb would let it pass, probably breaking
subsequent accesses to the row. No doubt the original coding overlooked
this simple sanity check because in the beginning we didn't have any way
to mark catalog columns NOT NULL at initdb time.
If we allow this, whatever outer command has the table open will not know
about the new index and may fail to update it as needed, as shown in a
report from Laurenz Albe. We already had such a prohibition in place for
ALTER TABLE, but the CREATE INDEX syntax missed the check.
Fixing it requires an API change for DefineIndex(), which conceivably
would break third-party extensions if we were to back-patch it. Given
how long this problem has existed without being noticed, fixing it in
the back branches doesn't seem worth that risk.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/A737B7A37273E048B164557ADEF4A58B53A4DC9A@ntex2010i.host.magwien.gv.at
AFAICT, the only actual benefit of closing a bootstrap transaction
is to reclaim transient memory. We can do that a lot more cheaply
by just doing a MemoryContextReset on a suitable context. This
gets the runtime of the "bootstrap" phase of initdb down to the
point where, at least by eyeball, it's quite negligible compared
to the rest of the phases. Per discussion with Andres Freund.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9244.1492106743@sss.pgh.pa.us
copyObject() is declared to return void *, which allows easily assigning
the result independent of the input, but it loses all type checking.
If the compiler supports typeof or something similar, cast the result to
the input type. This creates a greater amount of type safety. In some
cases, where the result is assigned to a generic type such as Node * or
Expr *, new casts are now necessary, but in general casts are now
unnecessary in the normal case and indicate that something unusual is
happening.
Reviewed-by: Mark Dilger <hornschnorter@gmail.com>
Previously, auxiliary processes and background workers not connected
to a database (such as the logical replication launcher) weren't
shown. Include them, so that we can see the associated wait state
information. Add a new column to identify the processes type, so that
people can filter them out easily using SQL if they wish.
Before this patch was written, there was discussion about whether we
should expose this information in a separate view, so as to avoid
contaminating pg_stat_activity with things people might not want to
see. But putting everything in pg_stat_activity was a more popular
choice, so that's what the patch does.
Kuntal Ghosh, reviewed by Amit Langote and Michael Paquier. Some
revisions and bug fixes by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYES5nhkEGw9nZXU8_FhA8XEm8NTm3-SO+3ML1B81Hkww@mail.gmail.com
This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
The speed gains primarily come from:
- non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
- simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
function calls
- sharing some state between different sub-expressions
- reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
nearly all of the previously used linked lists
- more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
constant re-checks at evaluation time
Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
- basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
statements. That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
initialization overhead is measurable.
- optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
work has already been made.
- optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
been made here too.
The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
backward-incompatible changes:
- Function permission checks are now done during expression
initialization, whereas previously they were done during
execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
different array type previously didn't perform checks.
- The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer. The behavior
around might still change.
Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
changes by Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
Condition variables provide a flexible way to sleep until a
cooperating process causes an arbitrary condition to become true. In
simple cases, this can be accomplished with a WaitLatch/ResetLatch
loop; the cooperating process can call SetLatch after performing work
that might cause the condition to be satisfied, and the waiting
process can recheck the condition each time. However, if the process
performing the work doesn't have an easy way to identify which
processes might be waiting, this doesn't work, because it can't
identify which latches to set. Condition variables solve that problem
by internally maintaining a list of waiters; a process that may have
caused some waiter's condition to be satisfied must "signal" or
"broadcast" on the condition variable.
Robert Haas and Thomas Munro
Where possible, use palloc or pg_malloc instead; otherwise, insert
explicit NULL checks.
Generally speaking, these are places where an actual OOM is quite
unlikely, either because they're in client programs that don't
allocate all that much, or they're very early in process startup
so that we'd likely have had a fork() failure instead. Hence,
no back-patch, even though this is nominally a bug fix.
Michael Paquier, with some adjustments by me
Discussion: <CAB7nPqRu07Ot6iht9i9KRfYLpDaF2ZuUv5y_+72uP23ZAGysRg@mail.gmail.com>
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Now indexes (but only B-tree for now) can contain "extra" column(s) which
doesn't participate in index structure, they are just stored in leaf
tuples. It allows to use index only scan by using single index instead
of two or more indexes.
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with minor editorializing by me
Reviewers: David Rowley, Peter Geoghegan, Jeff Janes
When a process is waiting for a heavyweight lock, we will now indicate
the type of heavyweight lock for which it is waiting. Also, you can
now see when a process is waiting for a lightweight lock - in which
case we will indicate the individual lock name or the tranche, as
appropriate - or for a buffer pin.
Amit Kapila, Ildus Kurbangaliev, reviewed by me. Lots of helpful
discussion and suggestions by many others, including Alexander
Korotkov, Vladimir Borodin, and many others.
For upcoming BRIN opclasses, it's convenient to have strategy numbers
defined in a single place. Since there's nothing appropriate, create
it. The StrategyNumber typedef now lives there, as well as existing
strategy numbers for B-trees (from skey.h) and R-tree-and-friends (from
gist.h). skey.h is forced to include stratnum.h because of the
StrategyNumber typedef, but gist.h is not; extensions that currently
rely on gist.h for rtree strategy numbers might need to add a new
A few .c files can stop including skey.h and/or gist.h, which is a nice
side benefit.
Per discussion:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150514232132.GZ2523@alvh.no-ip.org
Authored by Emre Hasegeli and Álvaro.
(It's not clear to me why bootscanner.l has any #include lines at all.)
The new type has the scope of whole the database cluster so it doesn't
behave the same as the existing OID alias types which have database
scope,
concerning object dependency. To avoid confusion constants of the new
type are prohibited from appearing where dependencies are made involving
it.
Also, add a note to the docs about possible MVCC violation and
optimization issues, which are general over the all reg* types.
Kyotaro Horiguchi
Multixact member files are subject to early wraparound overflow and
removal: if the average multixact size is above a certain threshold (see
note below) the protections against offset overflow are not enough:
during multixact truncation at checkpoint time, some
pg_multixact/members files would be removed because the server considers
them to be old and not needed anymore. This leads to loss of files that
are critical to interpret existing tuples's Xmax values.
To protect against this, since we don't have enough info in pg_control
and we can't modify it in old branches, we maintain shared memory state
about the oldest value that we need to keep; we use this during new
multixact creation to abort if an old still-needed file would get
overwritten. This value is kept up to date by checkpoints, which makes
it not completely accurate but should be good enough. We start emitting
warnings sometime earlier, so that the eventual multixact-shutdown
doesn't take DBAs completely by surprise (more precisely: once 20
members SLRU segments are remaining before shutdown.)
On troublesome average multixact size: The threshold size depends on the
multixact freeze parameters. The oldest age is related to the greater of
multixact_freeze_table_age and multixact_freeze_min_age: anything
older than that should be removed promptly by autovacuum. If autovacuum
is keeping up with multixact freezing, the troublesome multixact average
size is
(2^32-1) / Max(freeze table age, freeze min age)
or around 28 members per multixact. Having an average multixact size
larger than that will eventually cause new multixact data to overwrite
the data area for older multixacts. (If autovacuum is not able to keep
up, or there are errors in vacuuming, the actual maximum is
multixact_freeeze_max_age instead, at which point multixact generation
is stopped completely. The default value for this limit is 400 million,
which means that the multixact size that would cause trouble is about 10
members).
Initial bug report by Timothy Garnett, bug #12990
Backpatch to 9.3, where the problem was introduced.
Authors: Álvaro Herrera, Thomas Munro
Reviews: Thomas Munro, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Kevin Grittner
The changed routines are mostly those that can be directly called by
ProcessUtilitySlow; the intention is to make the affected object
information more precise, in support for future event trigger changes.
Originally it was envisioned that the OID of the affected object would
be enough, and in most cases that is correct, but upon actually
implementing the event trigger changes it turned out that ObjectAddress
is more widely useful.
Additionally, some command execution routines grew an output argument
that's an object address which provides further info about the executed
command. To wit:
* for ALTER DOMAIN / ADD CONSTRAINT, it corresponds to the address of
the new constraint
* for ALTER OBJECT / SET SCHEMA, it corresponds to the address of the
schema that originally contained the object.
* for ALTER EXTENSION {ADD, DROP} OBJECT, it corresponds to the address
of the object added to or dropped from the extension.
There's no user-visible change in this commit, and no functional change
either.
Discussion: 20150218213255.GC6717@tamriel.snowman.net
Reviewed-By: Stephen Frost, Andres Freund
transformExpr() has for many years had provisions to do nothing when
applied to an already-transformed expression tree. However, this was
always ugly and of dubious reliability, so we'd be much better off without
it. The primary historical reason for it was that gram.y sometimes
returned multiple links to the same subexpression, which is no longer true
as of my BETWEEN fixes. We'd also grown some lazy hacks in CREATE TABLE
LIKE (failing to distinguish between raw and already-transformed index
specifications) and one or two other places.
This patch removes the need for and support for re-transforming already
transformed expressions. The index case is dealt with by adding a flag
to struct IndexStmt to indicate that it's already been transformed;
which has some benefit anyway in that tablecmds.c can now Assert that
transformation has happened rather than just assuming. The other main
reason was some rather sloppy code for array type coercion, which can
be fixed (and its performance improved too) by refactoring.
I did leave transformJoinUsingClause() still constructing expressions
containing untransformed operator nodes being applied to Vars, so that
transformExpr() still has to allow Var inputs. But that's a much narrower,
and safer, special case than before, since Vars will never appear in a raw
parse tree, and they don't have any substructure to worry about.
In passing fix some oversights in the patch that added CREATE INDEX
IF NOT EXISTS (missing processing of IndexStmt.if_not_exists). These
appear relatively harmless, but still sloppy coding practice.
Bootstrap determines whether a column is null based on simple builtin
rules. Those work surprisingly well, but nonetheless a few existing
columns aren't set correctly. Additionally there is at least one patch
sent to hackers where forcing the nullness of a column would be helpful.
The boostrap format has gained FORCE [NOT] NULL for this, which will be
emitted by genbki.pl when BKI_FORCE_(NOT_)?NULL is specified for a
column in a catalog header.
This patch doesn't change the marking of any existing columns.
Discussion: 20150215170014.GE15326@awork2.anarazel.de
Sometimes it's useful for a background worker to be able to initialize
its database connection by OID rather than by name, so provide a way
to do that.
Since commit 626eb02198 has introduced the auxiliary process
infrastructure, bootstrap_signals() was never used when forked from
postmaster.
Remove the IsUnderPostmaster specific code, and add a appropriate
assertion.
Move common code, that was duplicated in every postmaster child/every
standalone process, into two functions in miscinit.c. Not only does
that already result in a fair amount of net code reduction but it also
makes it much easier to remove more duplication in the future. The
prime motivation wasn't code deduplication though, but easier addition
of new common code.
MapArrayTypeName would copy up to NAMEDATALEN-1 bytes of the base type
name, which of course is wrong: after prepending '_' there is only room for
NAMEDATALEN-2 bytes. Aside from being the wrong result, this case would
lead to overrunning the statically allocated work buffer. This would be a
security bug if the function were ever used outside bootstrap mode, but it
isn't, at least not in any currently supported branches.
Aside from fixing the off-by-one loop logic, this patch gets rid of the
static work buffer by having MapArrayTypeName pstrdup its result; the sole
caller was already doing that, so this just requires moving the pstrdup
call. This saves a few bytes but mainly it makes the API a lot cleaner.
Back-patch on the off chance that there is some third-party code using
MapArrayTypeName with less-secure input. Pushing pstrdup into the function
should not cause any serious problems for such hypothetical code; at worst
there might be a short term memory leak.
Per Coverity scanning.
This reverts commit 45b7abe59e.
It turns out that the %name-prefix syntax without "=" does not work
at all in pre-2.4 Bison. We are not prepared to make such a large
jump in minimum required Bison version just to suppress a warning
message in a version hardly any developers are using yet.
When 3.0 gets more popular, we'll figure out a way to deal with this.
In the meantime, BISONFLAGS=-Wno-deprecated is recommendable for
anyone using 3.0 who doesn't want to see the warning.
%name-prefix doesn't use an "=" sign according to the Bison docs, but it
silently accepted one anyway, until Bison 3.0. This was originally a
typo of mine in commit 012abebab1, and we
seem to have slavishly copied the error into all the other grammar files.
Per report from Vik Fearing; analysis by Peter Eisentraut.
Back-patch to all active branches, since somebody might try to build
a back branch with up-to-date tools.
If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent
activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table
than other parts. At least in the case of CREATE INDEX, this can be
used to cause the permissions checks to be performed against a
different table than the index creation, allowing for a privilege
escalation attack.
This changes the calling convention for DefineIndex, CreateTrigger,
transformIndexStmt, transformAlterTableStmt, CheckIndexCompatible
(in 9.2 and newer), and AlterTable (in 9.1 and older). In addition,
CheckRelationOwnership is removed in 9.2 and newer and the calling
convention is changed in older branches. A field has also been added
to the Constraint node (FkConstraint in 8.4). Third-party code calling
these functions or using the Constraint node will require updating.
Report by Andres Freund. Patch by Robert Haas and Andres Freund,
reviewed by Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2014-0062
We used to have externs for getopt() and its API variables scattered
all over the place. Now that we find we're going to need to tweak the
variable declarations for Cygwin, it seems like a good idea to have
just one place to tweak.
In this commit, the variables are declared "#ifndef HAVE_GETOPT_H".
That may or may not work everywhere, but we'll soon find out.
Andres Freund
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.
Peter Eisentraut