• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix management of pendingOpsTable in auxiliary processes. · 4a9c30a8
    Tom Lane authored
    mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to
    create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process.  This led
    to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as
    intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary
    processes such as walwriter and walreceiver.  Creation of the table in the
    bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone
    to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are
    never acted on.  So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd
    which could result in data loss after an OS crash.  I think there is no
    live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never
    perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for
    future breakage in those processes too.
    
    To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's
    AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for
    the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable.  Having done
    that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as
    am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown.  (Note that we
    could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(),
    because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain()
    before entering any of the process-type-specific code.)
    
    Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of
    bgwriter and checkpointer processes.  The bogus pendingOpsTable exists
    in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent
    any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older
    branches alone.
    4a9c30a8
bootstrap.h 1.56 KB