Pinning/Unpinning a buffer is a very frequent operation; especially in
read-mostly cache resident workloads. Benchmarking shows that in various
scenarios the spinlock protecting a buffer header's state becomes a
significant bottleneck. The problem can be reproduced with pgbench -S on
larger machines, but can be considerably worse for queries which touch
the same buffers over and over at a high frequency (e.g. nested loops
over a small inner table).
To allow atomic operations to be used, cram BufferDesc's flags,
usage_count, buf_hdr_lock, refcount into a single 32bit atomic variable;
that allows to manipulate them together using 32bit compare-and-swap
operations. This requires reducing MAX_BACKENDS to 2^18-1 (which could
be lifted by using a 64bit field, but it's not a realistic configuration
atm).
As not all operations can easily implemented in a lockfree manner,
implement the previous buf_hdr_lock via a flag bit in the atomic
variable. That way we can continue to lock the header in places where
it's needed, but can get away without acquiring it in the more frequent
hot-paths. There's some additional operations which can be done without
the lock, but aren't in this patch; but the most important places are
covered.
As bufmgr.c now essentially re-implements spinlocks, abstract the delay
logic from s_lock.c into something more generic. It now has already two
users, and more are coming up; there's a follupw patch for lwlock.c at
least.
This patch is based on a proof-of-concept written by me, which Alexander
Korotkov made into a fully working patch; the committed version is again
revised by me. Benchmarking and testing has, amongst others, been
provided by Dilip Kumar, Alexander Korotkov, Robert Haas.
On a large x86 system improvements for readonly pgbench, with a high
client count, of a factor of 8 have been observed.
Author: Alexander Korotkov and Andres Freund
Discussion: 2400449.GjM57CE0Yg@dinodell
This feature is controlled by a new old_snapshot_threshold GUC. A
value of -1 disables the feature, and that is the default. The
value of 0 is just intended for testing. Above that it is the
number of minutes a snapshot can reach before pruning and vacuum
are allowed to remove dead tuples which the snapshot would
otherwise protect. The xmin associated with a transaction ID does
still protect dead tuples. A connection which is using an "old"
snapshot does not get an error unless it accesses a page modified
recently enough that it might not be able to produce accurate
results.
This is similar to the Oracle feature, and we use the same SQLSTATE
and error message for compatibility.
This patch is a no-op patch which is intended to reduce the chances
of failures of omission once the functional part of the "snapshot
too old" patch goes in. It adds parameters for snapshot, relation,
and an enum to specify whether the snapshot age check needs to be
done for the page at this point. This initial patch passes NULL
for the first two new parameters and BGP_NO_SNAPSHOT_TEST for the
third. The follow-on patch will change the places where the test
needs to be made.
Up to now checkpoints were written in the order they're in the
BufferDescriptors. That's nearly random in a lot of cases, which
performs badly on rotating media, but even on SSDs it causes slowdowns.
To avoid that, sort checkpoints before writing them out. We currently
sort by tablespace, relfilenode, fork and block number.
One of the major reasons that previously wasn't done, was fear of
imbalance between tablespaces. To address that balance writes between
tablespaces.
The other prime concern was that the relatively large allocation to sort
the buffers in might fail, preventing checkpoints from happening. Thus
pre-allocate the required memory in shared memory, at server startup.
This particularly makes it more efficient to have checkpoint flushing
enabled, because that'll often result in a lot of writes that can be
coalesced into one flush.
Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches. When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively. This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.
On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.
Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache. Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.
While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.
With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.
A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences. This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.
Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
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.
In 4b4b680c3 I accidentally used sizeof(PrivateRefCountArray) instead of
sizeof(PrivateRefCountEntry) when creating the refcount overflow
hashtable. As the former is bigger than the latter, this luckily only
resulted in a slightly increased memory usage when many buffers are
pinned in a backend.
Reported-By: Takashi Horikawa
Discussion: 73FA3881462C614096F815F75628AFCD035A48C3@BPXM01GP.gisp.nec.co.jp
Backpatch: 9.5, where thew new ref count infrastructure was introduced
This is a quick hack, due to be reverted when its purpose has been served,
to try to gather information about why some of the buildfarm critters
regularly fail with "postmaster does not shut down" complaints. Maybe they
are just really overloaded, but maybe something else is going on. Hence,
instrument pg_ctl to print the current time when it starts waiting for
postmaster shutdown and when it gives up, and add a lot of logging of the
current time in the server's checkpoint and shutdown code paths.
No attempt has been made to make this pretty. I'm not even totally sure
if it will build on Windows, but we'll soon find out.
Move the content lock directly into the BufferDesc, so that locking and
pinning a buffer touches only one cache line rather than two. Adjust
the definition of BufferDesc slightly so that this doesn't make the
BufferDesc any larger than one cache line (at least on platforms where
a spinlock is only 1 or 2 bytes).
We can't fit the I/O locks into the BufferDesc and stay within one
cache line, so move those to a completely separate tranche. This
leaves a relatively limited number of LWLocks in the main tranche, so
increase the padding of those remaining locks to a full cache line,
rather than allowing adjacent locks to share a cache line, hopefully
reducing false sharing.
Performance testing shows that these changes make little difference
on laptop-class machines, but help significantly on larger servers,
especially those with more than 2 sockets.
Andres Freund, originally based on an earlier patch by Simon Riggs.
Review and cosmetic adjustments (including heavy rewriting of the
comments) by me.
e3f4cfc7 introduced a LWLockHeldByMe() call, without the corresponding
Assert() surrounding it.
Spotted by Coverity.
Backpatch: 9.1+, like the previous commit
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-
Prior to commit 0709b7ee72, access to
variables within a spinlock-protected critical section had to be done
through a volatile pointer, but that should no longer be necessary.
Review by Andres Freund
Per discussion, nowadays it is possible to have tablespaces that have
wildly different I/O characteristics from others. Setting different
effective_io_concurrency parameters for those has been measured to
improve performance.
Author: Julien Rouhaud
Reviewed by: Andres Freund
In 4b4b680c I passed a buffer index number (starting from 0) instead of
a proper Buffer id (which start from 1 for shared buffers) in two
places.
This wasn't noticed so far as one of those locations isn't compiled at
all (PrintPinnedBufs) and the other one (InvalidBuffer) requires a
unlikely, but possible, set of circumstances to trigger a symptom.
To reduce the likelihood of such incidents a bit also convert existing
open coded mappings from buffer descriptors to buffer ids with
BufferDescriptorGetBuffer().
Author: Qingqing Zhou
Reported-By: Qingqing Zhou
Discussion: CAJjS0u2ai9ooUisKtkV8cuVUtEkMTsbK8c7juNAjv8K11zeCQg@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: 9.5 where the private ref count infrastructure was introduced
1. Replay of the WAL record for setting a bit in the visibility map
contained an assertion that a full-page image of that record type can only
occur with checksums enabled. But it can also happen with wal_log_hints, so
remove the assertion. Unlike checksums, wal_log_hints can be changed on the
fly, so it would be complicated to figure out if it was enabled at the time
that the WAL record was generated.
2. wal_log_hints has the same effect on the locking needed to read the LSN
of a page as data checksums. BufferGetLSNAtomic() didn't get the memo.
Backpatch to 9.4, where wal_log_hints was added.
Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.
Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.
Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.
When LockBufferForCleanup() has to wait for getting a cleanup lock on a
buffer it does so by setting a flag in the buffer header and then wait
for other backends to signal it using ProcWaitForSignal().
Unfortunately LockBufferForCleanup() missed that ProcWaitForSignal() can
return for other reasons than the signal it is hoping for. If such a
spurious signal arrives the wait flags on the buffer header will still
be set. That then triggers "ERROR: multiple backends attempting to wait
for pincount 1".
The fix is simple, unset the flag if still set when retrying. That
implies an additional spinlock acquisition/release, but that's unlikely
to matter given the cost of waiting for a cleanup lock. Alternatively
it'd have been possible to move responsibility for maintaining the
relevant flag to the waiter all together, but that might have had
negative consequences due to possible floods of signals. Besides being
more invasive.
This looks to be a very longstanding bug. The relevant code in
LockBufferForCleanup() hasn't changed materially since its introduction
and ProcWaitForSignal() was documented to return for unrelated reasons
since 8.2. The master only patch series removing ImmediateInterruptOK
made it much easier to hit though, as ProcSendSignal/ProcWaitForSignal
now uses a latch shared with other tasks.
Per discussion with Kevin Grittner, Tom Lane and me.
Backpatch to all supported branches.
Discussion: 11553.1423805224@sss.pgh.pa.us
Benchmarks has shown that aligning the buffer descriptor array to
cache lines is important for scalability; especially on bigger,
multi-socket, machines.
Currently the array sometimes already happens to be aligned by
happenstance, depending how large previous shared memory allocations
were. That can lead to wildly varying performance results after minor
configuration changes.
In addition to aligning the start of descriptor array, also force the
size of individual descriptors to be of a common cache line size (64
bytes). That happens to already be the case on 64bit platforms, but
this way we can change the struct BufferDesc more easily.
As the alignment primarily matters in highly concurrent workloads
which probably all are 64bit these days, and the space wastage of
element alignment would be a bit more noticeable on 32bit systems, we
don't force the stride to be cacheline sized on 32bit platforms for
now. If somebody does actual performance testing, we can reevaluate
that decision by changing the definition of BUFFERDESC_PADDED_SIZE.
Discussion: 20140202151319.GD32123@awork2.anarazel.de
Per discussion with Bruce Momjan, Tom Lane, Robert Haas, and Peter
Geoghegan.
As noted by Tom Lane the improvements in 4b4b680c3d had the problem
that in some situations we searched, entered and modified entries in
the private refcount hash while holding a spinlock. I had tried to
keep the logic entirely local to PinBuffer_Locked(), but that's not
really possible given it's called with a spinlock held...
Besides being disadvantageous from a performance point of view, this
also has problems with error handling safety. If we failed inserting
an entry into the hashtable due to an out of memory error, we'd error
out with a held spinlock. Not good.
Change the way private refcounts are manipulated: Before a buffer can
be tracked an entry has to be reserved using
ReservePrivateRefCountEntry(); then, if a entry is not found using
GetPrivateRefCountEntry(), it can be entered with
NewPrivateRefCountEntry().
Also take advantage of the fact that PinBuffer_Locked() currently is
never called for buffers that already have been pinned by the current
backend and don't search the private refcount entries for preexisting
local pins. That results in a small, but measurable, performance
improvement.
Additionally make ReleaseBuffer() always call UnpinBuffer() for shared
buffers. That avoids duplicating work in an eventual UnpinBuffer()
call that already has been done in ReleaseBuffer() and also saves some
code.
Per discussion with Tom Lane.
Discussion: 15028.1418772313@sss.pgh.pa.us
Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
There was a window in RestoreBackupBlock where a page would be zeroed out,
but not yet locked. If a backend pinned and locked the page in that window,
it saw the zeroed page instead of the old page or new page contents, which
could lead to missing rows in a result set, or errors.
To fix, replace RBM_ZERO with RBM_ZERO_AND_LOCK, which atomically pins,
zeroes, and locks the page, if it's not in the buffer cache already.
In stable branches, the old RBM_ZERO constant is renamed to RBM_DO_NOT_USE,
to avoid breaking any 3rd party extensions that might use RBM_ZERO. More
importantly, this avoids renumbering the other enum values, which would
cause even bigger confusion in extensions that use ReadBufferExtended, but
haven't been recompiled.
Backpatch to all supported versions; this has been racy since hot standby
was introduced.
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.
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.
Previously, we used an lwlock that was held from the time we began
seeking a candidate buffer until the time when we found and pinned
one, which is disastrous for concurrency. Instead, use a spinlock
which is held just long enough to pop the freelist or advance the
clock sweep hand, and then released. If we need to advance the clock
sweep further, we reacquire the spinlock once per buffer.
This represents a significant increase in atomic operations around
buffer eviction, but it still wins on many workloads. On others, it
may result in no gain, or even cause a regression, unless the number
of buffer mapping locks is also increased. However, that seems like
material for a separate commit. We may also need to consider other
methods of mitigating contention on this spinlock, such as splitting
it into multiple locks or jumping the clock sweep hand more than one
buffer at a time, but those, too, seem like separate improvements.
Patch by me, inspired by a much larger patch from Amit Kapila.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
Since the dawn of time (aka Postgres95) multiple pins of the same
buffer by one backend have been optimized not to modify the shared
refcount more than once. This optimization has always used a NBuffer
sized array in each backend keeping track of a backend's pins.
That array (PrivateRefCount) was one of the biggest per-backend memory
allocations, depending on the shared_buffers setting. Besides the
waste of memory it also has proven to be a performance bottleneck when
assertions are enabled as we make sure that there's no remaining pins
left at the end of transactions. Also, on servers with lots of memory
and a correspondingly high shared_buffers setting the amount of random
memory accesses can also lead to poor cpu cache efficiency.
Because of these reasons a backend's buffers pins are now kept track
of in a small statically sized array that overflows into a hash table
when necessary. Benchmarks have shown neutral to positive performance
results with considerably lower memory usage.
Patch by me, review by Robert Haas.
Discussion: 20140321182231.GA17111@alap3.anarazel.de
get_raw_page tried to validate the supplied block number against
RelationGetNumberOfBlocks(), which of course is only right when
accessing the main fork. In most cases, the main fork is longer
than the others, so that the check was too weak (allowing a
lower-level error to be reported, but no real harm to be done).
However, very small tables could have an FSM larger than their heap,
in which case the mistake prevented access to some FSM pages.
Per report from Torsten Foertsch.
In passing, make the bad-block-number error into an ereport not elog
(since it's certainly not an internal error); and fix sloppily
maintained comment for RelationGetNumberOfBlocksInFork.
This has been wrong since we invented relation forks, so back-patch
to all supported branches.
The existance of the assert_enabled variable (backing the
debug_assertions GUC) reduced the amount of knowledge some static code
checkers (like coverity and various compilers) could infer from the
existance of the assertion. That could have been solved by optionally
removing the assertion_enabled variable from the Assert() et al macros
at compile time when some special macro is defined, but the resulting
complication doesn't seem to be worth the gain from having
debug_assertions. Recompiling is fast enough.
The debug_assertions GUC is still available, but readonly, as it's
useful when diagnosing problems. The commandline/client startup option
-A, which previously also allowed to enable/disable assertions, has
been removed as it doesn't serve a purpose anymore.
While at it, reduce code duplication in bufmgr.c and localbuf.c
assertions checking for spurious buffer pins. That code had to be
reindented anyway to cope with the assert_enabled removal.
Commit a730183926 created rather a mess by
putting dependencies on backend-only include files into include/common.
We really shouldn't do that. To clean it up:
* Move TABLESPACE_VERSION_DIRECTORY back to its longtime home in
catalog/catalog.h. We won't consider this symbol part of the FE/BE API.
* Push enum ForkNumber from relfilenode.h into relpath.h. We'll consider
relpath.h as the source of truth for fork numbers, since relpath.c was
already partially serving that function, and anyway relfilenode.h was
kind of a random place for that enum.
* So, relfilenode.h now includes relpath.h rather than vice-versa. This
direction of dependency is fine. (That allows most, but not quite all,
of the existing explicit #includes of relpath.h to go away again.)
* Push forkname_to_number from catalog.c to relpath.c, just to centralize
fork number stuff a bit better.
* Push GetDatabasePath from catalog.c to relpath.c; it was rather odd
that the previous commit didn't keep this together with relpath().
* To avoid needing relfilenode.h in common/, redefine the underlying
function (now called GetRelationPath) as taking separate OID arguments,
and make the APIs using RelFileNode or RelFileNodeBackend into macro
wrappers. (The macros have a potential multiple-eval risk, but none of
the existing call sites have an issue with that; one of them had such a
risk already anyway.)
* Fix failure to follow the directions when "init" fork type was added;
specifically, the errhint in forkname_to_number wasn't updated, and neither
was the SGML documentation for pg_relation_size().
* Fix tablespace-path-too-long check in CreateTableSpace() to account for
fork-name component of maximum-length pathnames. This requires putting
FORKNAMECHARS into a header file, but it was rather useless (and
actually unreferenced) where it was.
The last couple of items are potentially back-patchable bug fixes,
if anyone is sufficiently excited about them; but personally I'm not.
Per a gripe from Christoph Berg about how include/common wasn't
self-contained.
Previously, such buffers weren't counted, with the possible result that
EXPLAIN (BUFFERS) and pg_stat_statements would understate the true
number of blocks dirtied by an SQL statement.
Back-patch to 9.2, where this counter was introduced.
Amit Kapila
This makes it possible to store lwlocks as part of some other data
structure in the main shared memory segment, or in a dynamic shared
memory segment. There is still a main LWLock array and this patch does
not move anything out of it, but it provides necessary infrastructure
for doing that in the future.
This change is likely to increase the size of LWLockPadded on some
platforms, especially 32-bit platforms where it was previously only
16 bytes.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund and KaiGai Kohei.
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.
MarkBufferDirtyHint() writes WAL, and should know if it's got a
standard buffer or not. Currently, the only callers where buffer_std
is false are related to the FSM.
In passing, rename XLOG_HINT to XLOG_FPI, which is more descriptive.
Back-patch to 9.3.
pg_filedump and other external utility programs are likely to want to be
able to check Postgres page checksums. To avoid messy duplication of code,
move the checksumming functionality into an exported header file, much as
we did awhile back for the CRC code.
In passing, get rid of an unportable assumption that a static char[] array
will be word-aligned, and do some other minor code beautification.
We copy the buffer before inserting an XLOG_HINT to avoid WAL CRC errors
caused by concurrent hint writes to buffer while share locked. To make this work
we refactor RestoreBackupBlock() to allow an XLOG_HINT to avoid the normal
path for backup blocks, which assumes the underlying buffer is exclusive locked.
Resulting code completely changes layout of XLOG_HINT WAL records, but
this isn't even beta code, so this is a low impact change.
In passing, avoid taking WALInsertLock for full page writes on checksummed
hints, remove related cruft from XLogInsert() and improve xlog_desc record for
XLOG_HINT.
Andres Freund
Bug report by Fujii Masao, testing by Jeff Janes and Jaime Casanova,
review by Jeff Davis and Simon Riggs. Applied with changes from review
and some comment editing.
Andres Freund