• Kevin Grittner's avatar
    Fix serialization anomalies due to race conditions on INSERT. · 585e2a3b
    Kevin Grittner authored
    On insert the CheckForSerializableConflictIn() test was performed
    before the page(s) which were going to be modified had been locked
    (with an exclusive buffer content lock).  If another process
    acquired a relation SIReadLock on the heap and scanned to a page on
    which an insert was going to occur before the page was so locked,
    a rw-conflict would be missed, which could allow a serialization
    anomaly to be missed.  The window between the check and the page
    lock was small, so the bug was generally not noticed unless there
    was high concurrency with multiple processes inserting into the
    same table.
    
    This was reported by Peter Bailis as bug #11732, by Sean Chittenden
    as bug #13667, and by others.
    
    The race condition was eliminated in heap_insert() by moving the
    check down below the acquisition of the buffer lock, which had been
    the very next statement.  Because of the loop locking and unlocking
    multiple buffers in heap_multi_insert() a check was added after all
    inserts were completed.  The check before the start of the inserts
    was left because it might avoid a large amount of work to detect a
    serialization anomaly before performing the all of the inserts and
    the related WAL logging.
    
    While investigating this bug, other SSI bugs which were even harder
    to hit in practice were noticed and fixed, an unnecessary check
    (covered by another check, so redundant) was removed from
    heap_update(), and comments were improved.
    
    Back-patch to all supported branches.
    
    Kevin Grittner and Thomas Munro
    585e2a3b
heapam.c 263 KB