• Tom Lane's avatar
    Avoid using potentially-under-aligned page buffers. · 44cac934
    Tom Lane authored
    There's a project policy against using plain "char buf[BLCKSZ]" local
    or static variables as page buffers; preferred style is to palloc or
    malloc each buffer to ensure it is MAXALIGN'd.  However, that policy's
    been ignored in an increasing number of places.  We've apparently got
    away with it so far, probably because (a) relatively few people use
    platforms on which misalignment causes core dumps and/or (b) the
    variables chance to be sufficiently aligned anyway.  But this is not
    something to rely on.  Moreover, even if we don't get a core dump,
    we might be paying a lot of cycles for misaligned accesses.
    
    To fix, invent new union types PGAlignedBlock and PGAlignedXLogBlock
    that the compiler must allocate with sufficient alignment, and use
    those in place of plain char arrays.
    
    I used these types even for variables where there's no risk of a
    misaligned access, since ensuring proper alignment should make
    kernel data transfers faster.  I also changed some places where
    we had been palloc'ing short-lived buffers, for coding style
    uniformity and to save palloc/pfree overhead.
    
    Since this seems to be a live portability hazard (despite the lack
    of field reports), back-patch to all supported versions.
    
    Patch by me; thanks to Michael Paquier for review.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1535618100.1286.3.camel@credativ.de
    44cac934
pg_verify_checksums.c 7.54 KB