• Tom Lane's avatar
    Preserve memory context of VarStringSortSupport buffers. · 06602372
    Tom Lane authored
    When enlarging the work buffers of a VarStringSortSupport object,
    varstrfastcmp_locale was careful to keep them in the ssup_cxt
    memory context; but varstr_abbrev_convert just used palloc().
    The latter creates a hazard that the buffers could be freed out
    from under the VarStringSortSupport object, resulting in stomping
    on whatever gets allocated in that memory later.
    
    In practice, because we only use this code for ICU collations
    (cf. 3df9c374), the problem is confined to use of ICU collations.
    I believe it may have been unreachable before the introduction
    of incremental sort, too, as traditional sorting usually just
    uses one context for the duration of the sort.
    
    We could fix this by making the broken stanzas in varstr_abbrev_convert
    match the non-broken ones in varstrfastcmp_locale.  However, it seems
    like a better idea to dodge the issue altogether by replacing the
    pfree-and-allocate-anew coding with repalloc, which automatically
    preserves the chunk's memory context.  This fix does add a few cycles
    because repalloc will copy the chunk's content, which the existing
    coding assumes is useless.  However, we don't expect that these buffer
    enlargement operations are performance-critical.  Besides that, it's
    far from obvious that copying the buffer contents isn't required, since
    these stanzas make no effort to mark the buffers invalid by resetting
    last_returned, cache_blob, etc.  That seems to be safe upon examination,
    but it's fragile and could easily get broken in future, which wouldn't
    get revealed in testing with short-to-moderate-size strings.
    
    Per bug #17584 from James Inform.  Whether or not the issue is
    reachable in the older branches, this code has been broken on its
    own terms from its introduction, so patch all the way back.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17584-95c79b4a7d771f44@postgresql.org
    06602372
varlena.c 164 KB