• Tom Lane's avatar
    Make LOAD of an already-loaded library into a no-op, instead of attempting · 602a9ef5
    Tom Lane authored
    to unload and re-load the library.
    
    The difficulty with unloading a library is that we haven't defined safe
    protocols for doing so.  In particular, there's no safe mechanism for
    getting out of a "hook" function pointer unless libraries are unloaded
    in reverse order of loading.  And there's no mechanism at all for undefining
    a custom GUC variable, so GUC would be left with a pointer to an old value
    that might or might not still be valid, and very possibly wouldn't be in
    the same place anymore.
    
    While the unload and reload behavior had some usefulness in easing
    development of new loadable libraries, it's of no use whatever to normal
    users, so just disabling it isn't giving up that much.  Someday we might
    care to expend the effort to develop safe unload protocols; but even if
    we did, there'd be little certainty that every third-party loadable module
    was following them, so some security restrictions would still be needed.
    
    Back-patch to 8.2; before that, LOAD was superuser-only anyway.
    
    Security: unprivileged users could crash backend.  CVE not assigned yet
    602a9ef5
xfunc.sgml 110 KB